Aesthetics [ Novel for this unit is The Old Man and The Sea ]

[ movie information, trailers ]

[ published study notes ]

Robert Francis

The Base Stealer

Poised between going on and back, pulled

Both ways taut like a tightrope-walker,

Fingertips pointing the opposites,

Now bouncing tiptoe like a dropped ball

Or, like a kid skipping rope, come on, come on,

Running a scattering of steps sidewise,

How he teeters, skitters, tingles, teases,

Taunts them, hovers like an ecstatic bird,

He’s only flirting, Crowd him, Crowd him,

Delicate, delicate, delicate, delicate—Now

Milton Acorn

The Fights

What an elusive target

the brain is! Set up

like a coconut on a flexible stem

it has 101 evasions.

A twisted nod slues a punch

a thin gillette's width

past a brain, or

a rude brush-cut to the chin

tucks one brain safe under another.

Two of these targets are

set up to be knocked down

for 25 dollars or a million.

In that TV picture in the parlor

the men, who linked move to move

in a chancy dance

are abstractions only.

Come to ringside, with two

experts in there. See

each step or blow pivoted,

balanced and sudden as gunfire.

See muscles wriggle, shine

in sweat like windshield rain.

In stinking dancehalls, in

the forums of small towns,

punches are cheaper but

still pieces of death.

For the brain's the target

with its hungers

and code of honour. See

in those stinking towns,

with long counts, swindling judges,

how fury ends with the last gong.

No matter who's the cheated one

they hug like a girl and a man.

It's a craft and

the body rhythmic and terrible,

the game of struggle.

We need something of its nature

but not this;

for the brain's the target

and round by round it's whittled

til nothing's left to a man

but a jerky bun, humming

with a gentleness less than human.

Arnold Adoff

Point Guard

You bring the ball down the court.

The pick is set.

The play is set. The movement of

the ball

is faster

than all

the defensive

hands and heads,

and you

get free.

You pass into the big girl

at the key. She turns

and

shoots and scores.

The crowd roars.

Scott Blaine

Hockey

The ice is smooth, smooth, smooth.

The air bites to the centre

Of warmth and flesh, and I whirl.

It begins in a game . . .

The puck swims, skims, veers,

Goes leading my vision

Beyond the chasing reach of my stick.

The air is sharp, steel-sharp.

I suck needles of breathing,

And feel the players converge.

It grows to a science . . .

We clot, break, drive,

Electrons in motion

In the magnetic pull of the puck.

The play is fast, fierce, tense.

Sticks click and snap like teeth

Of wolves on the scent of a prey.

It ends in the kill . . .

I am one of the pack in a mad,

Taut leap of desperation

In the wild, slashing drive for the goal.

Edward Hirsch

EXECUTION

The last time I saw my high school football coach

He had cancer stenciled into his face

Like pencil marks from the sun, like intricate

Drawings on the chalkboard, small x's and o's

That he copied down in a neat numerical hand

Before practice in the morning. By day's end

The board was a spiderweb of options and counters,

Blasts and sweeps, a constellation of players

Shining under his favorite word, Execution,

Underlined in the upper right-hand corner of things.

He believed in football like a new religion

And had perfect, unquestioning faith in the fundamentals

Of blocking and tackling, the idea of warfare

Without suffering or death, the concept of teammates

Moving in harmony like the planets - and yet

Our awkward adolescent bodies were always cancelling

The flawless beauty of Saturday afternoons in September,

Falling away from the particular grace of autumn,

The clear weather, the ideal game he imagined.

And so he drove us through punishing drills

On weekday afternoons, and doubled our practice time,

And challenged us to hammer him with forearms,

And devised elaborate, last-second plays - a flea-

Flicker, a triple reverse - to save us from defeat.

Almost always they worked. Despised losing

And loved winning more than his own body, maybe even

More than himself. But the last time I saw him

He looked wobbly and stunned by illness,

And I remembered the game in my senior year

When we met a downstate team who loved hitting

More than we did, who battered us all afternoon

With a vengeance, who destroyed us with timing

And power, with deadly, impersonal authority,

Machine-like fury, perfect execution.

Robert Wallace

The Double Play

In his sea lit

distance, the pitcher winding

like a clock about to chime comes down with

the ball, hit

sharply, under the artificial

banks of lights, bounds like a vanishing string

over the green

to the shortstop magically

scoops to his right whirling above his invisible

shadows

in the dust redirects

its flight to the running poised second baseman

pirouettes

leaping, above the slide, to throw

from mid-air, across the colored tightened interval,

to the leaning-

out first baseman ends the dance

drawing it disappearing into his long brown glove

stretches. What

is too swift for deception

is final, lost among the loosened figures

jogging off the field

(the pitcher walks), casual

in the space where the poem has happened.

Robert Francis

Catch

Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,

Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, every hand,

Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,

High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop,

Make him scoop it up, make him almost-as-possible miss it,

Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly,

Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant,

Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy,

Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down,

Over his head, make him scramble to pick up the meaning,

And now, like a posy, a pretty one plump in his hands.

Phil George

Make Me a Man

Ah, my first slain deer!

You were swift and sure,

But Grandfather’s arrows,

Piercing straight,

Have met their mark.

Rejoice! Mother Earth’s gift -

Your frisky life - is now returned.

In you I cup my palms

To drink your blood, rich-red,

Warm as the Sun noon-high.

Buck, make me a man.

Round my ankles, around again,

I will string black hooves.

May I dance your grace,

Bound through light-pintoed forests.

Her hands, soft and loving,

My Mother will prepare

Your velvet skin, quivering flesh.

Near your heart, still throbbing,

I partake and now become

Warm-hearted, strong, alert.

Buck, make me a man.

(from The Whispering Wind, 1972)