Game

Between periods,

boys at the urinals boymen, menboys, telling AIDS jokes, yelling Ain’t the game great.

Jesus, ‘djou see ‘em rack that one up right at the goal. . .

Freshman girls in the stands,

screaming at referees their fathers’ utmost obscenities. They must have learned

in the womb, here or in Rome, at some earlier series, limp but awake, the way,

in their parents’ arms, tonight’s kids are fallen.

The other side of the glass partition

the hurt players lie, scattered like death at Antietam, the trainers working over them, working them over,

to get them back in the game. O, its sheer violence,

our innate violence, my anger squared in that tight arena until I could not speak, or stay, but walked myself out into winter sky,

out through a door where a woman stamped me with an ink pinetree,

sure, since I’d paid so much, I would come back in.