Ball
Harry Bauld
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2014 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Tom Howard, Poetry
Danny Sullivan hit an old Spalding,
its seams already starting, and tore
the cover half off. It flopped
like a numb tongue, and we chased it down
and groped its guts like one of the thousand alewives
we blew up with firecrackers on the banks
of the Mystic River, unrolled
the yarn, blue-grey as the weft
of our grandmothers' ancient heads,
a quarter mile wound tight as terza rima
into the most compressed possible argument
around a nucleus that sang jump
from a fugue of clarity and cork. This was our first
mystery, what is inside and out, secrets
of speed and concussion, origin of the impetuous
and dangerous in the strictest order, an almost boring
vigilance of rules tightly wrapped,
exact specs; and then the filthy animal tent
of the case, its bridal white despoiled
by the surgical stitch of medical emergency,
a birth we couldn't conceive. We read the entrails
of spin, the stir of inner speculation, centrifugal
and planetary, questions and answers about air.
In the park we laid the wool along the dirt
and raced the length of its grip on us,
plotted with our sneakers the long line
between X and Y, and when we reached the end
there was hardly a breath left in us.
