Surprised By High School Football Practice
In May While Listening to Bessie Smith
Sing the Blues on Compact Disc
The sputtering clutter cleaned up
behind it, a now-stilled female voice,
freed from its amber of old acetate,
rides its full range of motion
and emotion unshackled, subtle, and raw.
It refracts simple words into dazzle,
beats wings and soars into flight
while young men ballooned in pads toil
and sweat on earth. As men, their polo
shirts swelling over healthy paunches,
scream at exhausted lineman to explode into
the bolsters held by teammates and runners
to hurtle themselves into vanishing holes,
Bessie’s eighty-year-old voice moans
“It’s hard to love someone / When
that someone don’t love you.” The boys,
many with fawn-thin legs and dilated
pupils, leap up awkwardly, regroup,
and impale grass-smeared, sodden jerseys
on each other over and over, the men
splitting the air with whistles, providing
punctuation to each ragged sentence,
and barking harsh new imperatives;
the singer’s voice, now preening itself
before some interior mirror, demands
“Better give me what I want, Daddy;
If you don’t, I know someone who will.”
At the other end of the field, toilers
taller and leaner streak to the count,
stutter to shake off clinging opponents
then cross the field like low-flying hawks,
raising up to talon balls as they wobble
(continued with break)
and flutter from the passers’ extended arms.
One stick-thin boy drops the oblong and
before hearing a word from the slow-whistled
man, hits the ground to piston ten pushups,
almost the way Army trainees gung-ho
themselves to curry favor with drill
instructors; the woman now despairs, “Some
of you mens sure do make me tired;
You got a mouth full of gimme, / And
a hand full of much obliged.” Having snorted,
at first, the way he would have
at out-of-season snow, the observer’s
reanimating old dreams begin to snap before
his eyes like clotheslined sheets. Proceeding
by stagger and muddle, the short and skinny
are here perhaps to pump energy the way
an oil well gushes crude. Some exhibiting
bits of flash aspire to satisfy again
a youthful sweet tooth for glory.
A few, burnished and enameled with muscle
and promise, try to hone talent into genius,
the kind that one day will mambo after
sudden sizzle and crow, “Nobody in town
can bake / A sweet jellyroll like mine.”
John Graves Morris (Bio coming soon)
