June, New Century
Trudell, Dennis
Poem June, New Century A man in a cage plays a soccer game in his mind. He does that while you and I do whatever we do for two hours. The telephone wakes me, and I speak briefly, dress and come...
...He hurts all the time...
...You start your car, or park it, or read headlines in a newspaper dispenser...
...The telephone wakes me, and I speak briefly, dress and come downtown here for coffee and a muffin-and to write: "A man in a cage plays a soccer game in his mind...
...The yellow slash of goalie that wayThe new smack of forehead and ball, loud, louder than the prisoner's aching bones, mindThe white-and-black streak to the upper left corner of goal, the goalie's finger-tick altering it-The ball's bounce and roll out of bounds...
...The yellow and red teams arrange themselves for a corner kick...
...The caged man keeps playing...
...His skull bears four captive years of weight...
...Dennis Trudell Dennis Trudell is the author of "Fragments in Us: Recent & Earlier Poems," and the editor of "Full Court: A Literary Anthology of Basketball...
...Yet it conceives a vivid green, where a young man launches himself parallel to his shadow, twists and jerks his head to arc the ball behind himWhere another young man traps it under cleats, feints left, right, dribbles left around a thicker man in yellow...
...Or make the clicks that computer keyboards make now, now...
...He's a prisoner of my country, or another country...
...If his spine is not a burning wire that hunger, thirst, stub of arm, throb of ribs, of testicles, gnaw of breaths is draped along . . . then it is venom freezing, freezing, never frozen...
...Around a bearded, shouting man in yellow-Passes to a quick, short man in blood-crimson, who stops the ball, the game, the turning world, while the prisoner waits, feels his pulse wait: one, two, three, four-Then flash of the short man's right leg, the ball's rise to a crimsoned man veering in from the left, left of the goal's white-gleaming left vertical pole...
...He lives in Madison, Wisconsin...
Vol. 71 • June 2007 • No. 6
