Athlete Poets

September 10, 2018

“The Why of Bull Riding” by Guinotte WisePosted by

Guinotte Wise

THE WHY OF BULL RIDING

They asked a cowboy why he rode, 
said he was too nervous to steal and
too lazy to work. There is no answer,
maybe a test of one’s inner gumption
though there are better ways to figure
that. It’s sure as hell not money, as in
why are you a poet? The same man
said, when asked, how much he made
that year. Twenty-two thousand was
the reply. How much were your 
expenses? Twenty-three thousand.
Not many answers in the game,
sometimes just a look away, a 
clearing of the throat, a grimace of
discomfort, a sidle toward the rodeo
office to sign up, draw his bull. He
hopes it is a good one, and hopes
he makes it to the buzzer in one
piece, decent score, hopes the old
Dodge starts, gets him to the next 
one, the big one at Cheyenne, see
what luck will bring. His ribs are
taped but beer and pain pills mess
up his edge, adrenaline is what he
needs, that’s his eight second cure.

—from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Guinotte Wise: “Rodeoing made me feel alive, alive-oh, as the Irish ballad goes. Then writing fiction and poetry became my arena. Same feeling. The more you put into it, the better you get, like anything else. Rejections are just flies on the windshield on the way to an acceptance, a ride to the buzzer.” (web)

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September 5, 2018

“Should I Spill My Beer” by Martin VestPosted by

Martin Vest

SHOULD I SPILL MY BEER

an automythography

I used to teach kung fu.
That’s a true thing I tell people
when I’m drunk.
As if to say I didn’t always
sit on this stool.
This is all part of a plan—
I’m not destroying myself;
it’s just that I have a keen sense of timing,
and now is not the time.
As if to say I could kill you
with the death touch.
Or I might kick you in the head
without bothering to stand up,
if the hour comes around.
As if to say this is not how it ends,
sulking in the bony half-light like a ghoul.
On this stool I trudge along,
waist-deep in the corpses of myself.
I am the mysterious wanderer
playing his flute in a forest of bamboo.
I am meditating beneath a waterfall
where the vain peony clings to its treacherous petals.
I am coming to the aid of a town extorted.
The imperial army cannot track me 
in the pure snow.
Should I spill my beer, the Jade Dragon
will rise from the foam
and agitate the ten thousand things.
I will ride it through the Jewel Gate
across a bridge of magpies,
which will scatter in flight behind me.

—from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Martin Vest: “Growing up, I had few friends and I never attended a school-sanctioned sporting event. But I practiced kung fu seven days a week, and I began teaching while still in high school. My instructor introduced me to the first ‘serious’ books I ever read—The Tao Te Ching, Journey to the West, The Book of Five Rings, and other Chinese and Japanese classics. Much of the work was over my head at the time, but I supplemented it with a hefty dose of martial arts movies—everything from Kurosawa to cheesy blood-and-gore flicks from Hong Kong. For various reasons, I stopped practicing kung fu but soon afterward I discovered poetry. The transition from one to the other was natural to me. In fact, I didn’t really see a difference between the two. Still don’t. Quickly, though, I began drinking heavily for 25 years. I don’t regret it, though my many hospitalizations suggest I should, perhaps. In recent years I have undergone other metamorphoses. ‘Should I Spill My Beer’ is a cacophony of lives made symphonic (with one ear plugged) by poetry.”

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September 3, 2018

“What Happens in Church” by Brent TerryPosted by

Brent Terry

WHAT HAPPENS IN CHURCH

for Robert Wilcox, 3/9/1939–11/29/2017

Another mudfunked Sunday, singletrack tripping
nine miles through the leafdeep and flat
fall light, not tumbling, somehow, over rocks
or roots, lungs sucking sweet oxygen
from the crystal, heart thundering red diatribes
the cardinals marry their carols to.
Your head is mostly empty, but your legs are full
of zoom, so you hurdle without thinking
the fallen body of a birch, which Saturday late
in a carnival of wind, gave up its forever bending
and finally went for broke. You have no idea
if it fell in a tirade of roots ripping, its knotted
torso torn from glacial till, or if slipping
from soil, it let go this earth with a satisfied sigh.
You know only that you’ll never speak
the language of softwoods. You’ll never ease
the grieving of worms. The mushrooms build
their bookshelves where birch bark used to be,
recite the natural histories with tongues
of rot and flame. Leaves float down in a ringing
of bells that only the salamanders can hear.
You pluck one from the breeze, hold it to your ear.

—from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Brent Terry: “I have been a runner since I was fifteen. For 40 years, laying down a patter of footfalls on asphalt, grass, or the soft and blessed dirt has been, as Eliot said, the coffee spoon of my days. I ran competitively in high school, college, and after, even competing professionally for a bit in my mid- and late-twenties. For years I celebrated each Thanksgiving and Christmas with a twenty-mile jaunt through still sleeping neighborhoods or drift-encrusted countryside. Birthdays were celebrated on the roads with friends, followed by beer and pizza. Nearly every occasion, big or small, has been marked by a run. Running brings treasured stretches of solitude: interludes of introspection and moments of slack-jawed wonder. It allows my friends and I to play like children again. Once upon a time I was a runner who wrote. Now I am most definitely a writer who runs. Either way, writing and running have always been married. The solitude provided by running gives poems time to form, shakes them loose and sets them tumbling around my brain. Oftentimes the rhythms of a run become the rhythms of the poem, the sights and sounds of a run become the images and songs of the poem. And the run offers escape from the desk, the seeming dead end of an uncooperative line. Running brings, as it always has, an animal joy, sense of freedom I have never found anywhere else, and I bring that animal, drunk on blood and freedom, home, where it continues to frolic and pounce, to sniff and howl from the white expanse of the page.”

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August 31, 2018

“Strangers” by Laszlo SlomovitsPosted by

Laszlo Slomovits

STRANGERS

A man is running hard
to catch the bus that just left.

It’s picking up speed but he
pulls even and raps on its side,

and a woman by the window
yells to the driver, who stops

and opens the accordion door.
But the man does not get on—

he points back to an old woman
who has not run a step

in a very long time
shuffling towards the bus.

Nor does he leave until he’s
helped her up both steps

then walks back slowly
still breathing hard

toward us who are
waiting for a different bus.

What can a group of strangers
do at a time like this?

A time in its own tiny way like
when Bob Hayes roared by them all

to bring the relay home,
or when Billy Mills devoured

the last 50 of the 10,000 meters
or when Joan Benoit came striding

into the stadium alone—and all of us
strangers stood up and cheered.

—from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Laszlo Slomovits: “One of my father’s heroes was Jesse Owens. Perhaps an unusual hero for an Orthodox Jew in 1930s rural Hungary, but you see, in a small way, my father was a ‘chariot of fire’ (to reference the famous movie of two other Olympic sprinters). Though he was a devout and religious man, in his youth my father loved to run and was a pretty good sprinter—not world class, but pretty good. So that was one reason. The other didn’t fully enter my father’s life until a number of years after Jesse’s amazing exploits at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. My father lost his wife, three children, both parents, three sisters, his only brother, and numerous more distant relatives and friends during the Holocaust. Jesse’s victory in the ‘Nazi Olympics’ symbolically took on heroic proportions. I grew up hearing legendary stories of Jesse Owens, and about my father having been a sprinter—which made me want to be one also. And I too was pretty good; definitely not world class, but good enough to be one of the tri-captains of the track team in my senior year at the University of Rochester. Much more importantly, I loved to run. While in college, I moved up from sprints to middle-distance racing and longer distance training, and found that I got my best ideas for writing poetry, song lyrics, and music while out on a long slow run, especially in nature. Now, nearing my seventh decade, I mostly go for walks and slow jogs, but still find inspiration and insight during those times, moving in those ways.” (web)

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August 29, 2018

“Can We Know?” by Jack RidlPosted by

Jack Ridl

CAN WE KNOW?

After nibbling at his food,
our old dog’s sleeping
again, breathing heavily.

We say, “Well, he’s old. Maybe
that’s all it is.” The birds come
to the feeder. We don’t know them.

We assume we know our dog
who barks when it’s time
for his walk or to pee. Was

it because of us and biscuits
that he alchemized from
abandonment into one of us?

Damn anyone who calls us
sentimental for our years
of loving him like family.

We believe in the comfort
of his wag, his lying every night
amid our long and given marriage.

No one asks for loneliness.

—from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Jack Ridl: “I was a point guard, the last ninth grader to start on a varsity high school team in Pennsylvania until years later, when anyone could play a varsity sport. I was also a shortstop, good enough to play on a traveling All-Star team with the likes of Dick Allen. My father was the basketball coach at Westminster College where his team was ranked number one in the country in 1962 and toured South America. I, as an entering freshman, played on that team. In the mid-’60s, he became the head basketball coach at the University of Pittsburgh where he also invented what became known as The Amoeba Offense, a variation of which every team from third grade to the pros now use. The recipient of many coaching awards, my father was likely the greatest influence on my being a poet—not in choosing to be, but because he instilled in me a love (believe it or not) of practice and discipline. Working to get a line just right is a joy compared to dribbling for an hour with your left hand every day and fielding bad hop ground balls into a late evening.” (web)

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August 27, 2018

“Two from Searching for the Soul” by Tom MescheryPosted by

Tom Meschery

TWO FROM SEARCHING FOR THE SOUL

1.

In this room, among men of my generation of athletes, gray haired, aging
and aged, Joe Kapp, wild man, Mexican/Indian, famous for his exploits
on the football field, still wild, here like the rest of us to honor a great
dead coach, embraces me. And I embrace back, hearing him whisper
in my ear the word Soul as if he is imparting to me a special secret
he’s discovered on his journey into the condition of dementia.
Too many knocks on the old noggin fuck it who gives a shit didn’t we
have some good times? Was he telling me I had a soul or that souls
are present in this room, wafting through the air with the bravado
stories of our heroics? Oh, that we were ever so young and athletic
and destined for greatness. Was he pouring from the cup of his mouth
some special knowledge into my ear, a warm and blessed liquid. O my soul,
is that you, coming to me when I least expect it, announcing your existence
among so many good men, through the mouth of this man, shaman
of expletives, high priest of stories and fists, and laughs, and beers
and hijinks that I recall left us all breathless, filled with good humor? O Joe,
quarterback, who never ran out of bounds because only gringos do, wild,
violent Joe, have you given me a parting gift, a piece of the eternal puzzle?

2.

There are souls and then there are Russian souls—wintery and sad.
Dead souls and souls reeking of vodka, souls dancing, souls weeping.
There are souls among the fat men in the banya, souls thrashed
to a pink glow by the banya-master, souls that fall into the ice
bath and rise like pot-bellied Christs out of the baptismal.
I am the son of Russians visiting Saint Petersburg at the start
of banya season. Between herring in sour cream, black bread,
and vodka, I am slapped on the back and told I possess
the soul of a Russian. There is no better place to find
the soul than in the banya. Ask any Russian. First comes
the vodka, the poems by Pushkin and Lermontov follow.
Pushkin is gold, Lermontov is silver. Outside, the weather
is changing. Soon it will snow. This too invites a discussion
on the nature of the soul. How it is best understood in winter.
How one soul will fall from the sky, then another and another.

—from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Tom Meschery: “As a Russian immigrant, I learned to play basketball in order to become an American. I learned the game well enough to become a high school and college All-American. I played ten years in the National Basketball Association with the Golden State Warriors and the Seattle Sonics. As a Russian, I grew up on poetry—Pushkin, Lermentov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam. I began writing poems while I was an NBA player. I’ve never stopped. Sport is a sensory activity, so is writing poetry. I allowed instinct to guide my basketball. I allow instinct to guide my poetry.” (web)

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August 24, 2018

“Golf with Bob” by Michael MarkPosted by

Michael Mark

GOLF WITH BOB

A romantic might see lovers’
footprints—two sets, stride by stride,
crisscrossing slopes from tree-sheltered
tee boxes in morning’s wet grass

before they suddenly part.
But that was just us, heading off
to find our drives, hit our irons—Nice one!
or Uh-oh! Then

the distinct steps blur, blotch, hurry
back to the other’s side, move greenward,
near enough so a detective or suspicious wife
could imagine hands were held.

We weren’t even good friends.
Our games were just well matched.
His power, my strategy. Monday
and Wednesday partners.

Now I play with whoever’s up for a game.
On the 14th hole I still look around, lose
focus, my drives wandering
into the tall magnolias

like Bob’s used to. We’d stop
and hunt through the small forest, musty
and thick with fallen leaves,
for as long as it took.

—from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Michael Mark: “I found a busted-up partial set of clubs in the dump behind where I grew up. I ended up playing on the high school golf team (borough champs), and for a semester in college—I wasn’t good enough to stay on the team. Later, I became the Match Play Champion at LaCosta Country Club. What I’m proud of, maybe as proud of as any accomplishment, is that I was behind in all nine matches in the Match Play contest—over twelve weeks, against serious players, some former professional athletes—and I beat them all. As for the connection to poetry: maybe the stillness of the body with the rhythm in the swing? Maybe: it’s okay to not be a natural at something but if you love it, do it. I’d bet it’s: ‘Find it in the dirt’—Ben Hogan.” (web)

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