As was the case with “Scars Poetica,” this piece held a position as one of the 30 Poems in 51until the penultimate restructuring of the book. Its closing image became the triggering subject for the lyric “Roadwork In The Boneyard,” so it was especially difficult to let go of that nexus. C'est la vie.
LIFE SO FAR
The sun chins the horizon
like a gold medal winner, high
on endorphins, on adrenaline, on the verge
of shattering the galaxy’s record
nonillion-rep score. Until today
I have been cooling down for too many years,
losing my fury—dozing off and going soft—
bullshitting the apathetic so-called fans
around me until I’ve become one of them, hoisting
our plastic cups of flat suds
day in, day out.
The plot is to make us
leave the coliseum forever and piss away
what’s left. The hotdog man tempts us,
smothered between health and old age,
with his bark—“Top jobs! Bennies!
Git yer red-hot top jobs with bennies”—
to keep us buying, did he say goods?,
until the day we punch out. As we count
our change, the hotdog man becomes a speck
in the upper deck. “Where the fuck’s the mustard?”
I wonder, as the fat ladies
—their pointy elbows pinning me on both sides—
threaten to sing if I do not stop
yelling “down in front” to the young studs
still fired-up and focused on the games. That was me
before, distracted, I joined the humdrum ranks
of the automaton cloned. I’m weary of this role—of being
cast an extra to the extras among the extra
throngs needed to make this epoch film, all glitz
and Hollywood schtick.
Today I vow to fight
my defiant way back onto the starlit field,
to master the sun’s techniques, to learn
how it grips the bar with fingers
we never see—what muscles it flexes
to vault its slow-motion handstand on air
across the sky. I want to live
its intricate physics, the aerodynamic
mechanics of strength. Does it kick its legs
for thrust? Does it grimace with eyes closed
below the bar? Because I vow in blood to burn, I will
do my roadwork in the boneyard, and shadow
box against the thickest stone.
For Peter O’Brien |