One of the techniques I learned as an undergraduate was poem-a-day: a sequence written daily. In 1998 my wife and I took our 10 month-old son on a cross-country camping trip along highway 50 during the Chicago Bulls “last dance.” I found places along the way to watch the games. Below are selections from that sequence synchronized to the Bulls’ journey.
The sequence starts during game 7 vs Indiana in the conference final. Toni Kukoc was shooting free throws when I projected myself toeing the line.
5/30 Start with basketball “On the line” Now Not now now at the same time Now at the line at the same Now: Time. Me? Me how. I watch sports on television during a seventeen year locust, a three year locust, ten thousand thousand disposable locust wrappers rotting on my overgrown lawn. Insect corrupts. The odor sharp, burnt five thousand thousand attempts at copulation. “I’m on the line.” Now.
June 9th I watched the game in a dive with rough characters who rooted for the Jazz. The next day drunken louts camped in the next site over and had a rottweiler that eyed my baby in his playpen and my houndfellow. Before I had time to move camp the rottie got loose and charged my dog. The poem I wrote that night is called “Pacifism.”
Pacifism The storm bedraggled Pacific wind twisted wood black sand grit grinds recedes grinds as waves tugged by lunar sway ring; they sing the albacore, shark, fishermen and loggers. They grin at the bar, point at my son and bellow, “What’s the little feller called?” A Rottweiler growls and barks, paws until his leash is loosed. Jumps the bones of my hound. Heyshithighshitshithey My wife hates the world, and me already in it. Her blood’s run cold with travel. The night air is chilled with furlongs of road and eye upstaring of a dead deer. Predation leads to Perdition: It is for that I knot penance as my lead, looped around scarcity and ole malevolent nerve. Four tents, twelve ruffians, a Rottweiler, and myriad fish in the ocean. My wife’s zipper augurs hatred. Ruffians are drinking beer and cursing. Fish swim in chains. The Rottweiler is at my dog’s throat. Later, I am looking at the ocean, whittling to a point a cubit long section of the staff I broke on the Rottweiler’s back. I am serene; I am off my lead.
This part of the sequence ends happily on June 14 when Jordan hits his jumper.
An Ode Oh Pindaric Jordan! The laurel scent of your distant river carries here, can be picked out of the thin air. Six times your city has been broadened in your name, the warmest scores on the wall in the temple of now. We, who swallow Fate as we gasp to finish a race, salute you. We wait for that second wind. The third wind is hope we can speed past indictment for our moralings. The fourth carries our name. The fifth remains acrobatically above it all. The sixth is the chance that immortality is physical. Nevertheless, we all struggle daily, like my campground buddy hollering, “I rolled on the ground. I thought I was dying until I realized I was bragging.”
Mike Barrett Archive 