Explore Poems: Sports & Outdoor Activities

Blood-gushered mountainside a brass parapegma of noon
glares behind: gore of hides. Beasts all slain. Shadeless midday. Specterless
differentiation. Glad day zodiacs augur. Awl of insight; hunters'
blades. Actaeon: and the spirits of motion. Actaeon
uttering:...

& I immediately think of Cheryl, her Malik, his beloved
obsession with the team’s orange & blue, a sunset…

1.
After the beginning of the gallop, there are counts when the horse is in the air, her
legs withdrawn, a diamond shape.

This is called suspension.

2.
Her name is Sallie Gardner.

She’s by Vandal, out of Charlotte Thompson, Kentucky bred, of Irish pedigree, a
Birdcatcher.

Now...

In springtime, chief of all seasons,
        in May when new joys rise and flourish,
                the sun is lord and messenger at once and sends down to us
        to rouse our bodies and be merry:
humankind to...

In this life, there are stars
and there are stunt doubles.

Before I became one of those fathers
obsessed with memorizing his lines,
making peace with the Big Director
in the sky who doesn’t like ad libs,
before all that, I was the star
of my own...

Rinsing the sea salt out of our bikinis
with the drinking water and getting a slap
upside the head from your mother with her
House & Garden magazine reserved especially
for fanning away mosquitoes and sighing
because we know that this is how
it’s always going...

200 cows         more than 600 hilly acres

            property would have been even larger
had J not sold 66 acres to DuPont for
                waste from its Washington Works factory
where J was employed        
       ...

Water

Cold as it sounds

A stream in a forest and a boy fishing,
heart aflame, head hush, tasting the world—
lick and pant. The Holy Scripture
is animal not book.
I should know, I have smoked
the soul of God, psalm burning
between fingers on an African afternoon.
And how is...

The strongest boy in our high school
on the edge of Detroit did not play
sports—he would’ve had to cut
his long blond Samson hair
and put away his switchblade
and stop smoking dope.

The gone-to-seed coaches who taught
gym class hated him for the beauty
they could...

How the sweat-drenched vendors hawk
Old Styles to the drunken disorderlies—
who are us!—in the pilsner light
of August buzzing with gnats and lingo,
the umpire barking his commandments
like a clergy, the manager barking back
like a heretic. I douse my dog in ketchup,
and buy...

I swim my laps today, slowly, slowly,
reaching my arms out & over, my fleshly oars,
the water silken on my skin, my body still able
to be a body & resting at the pool’s lip,
I watch other bodies slip through the blue,
how...

A woman moves through a Cloud Hands position,
                        holding and rotating

an invisible globe—thud, shattering glass, moan,
                        horn blast—so many

worlds to this world—two men dipnet
                        sockeye salmon

at the mouth of a river—from a rooftop, a seagull
                        squawks and cries;

a woman moves...

During the age
Of segregation
There was a park
Purchased by Dr. Cal Johnson
For Black children to play
In

It had swings
A jumble gym
A basketball court
And a tennis court
Actually two

The little kids could play
In the afternoon
But when work was over
The men got the court

Matthew and...

A swimming pool hotter than bathwater.
Chlorine haze. My mother along the edge
encouraging me, with my Curious George, to swim.
Though I liked the Man with the Yellow Hat better.

Chlorine hazy and my mother at the edge.
Swim teacher says my legs are...

I was washing at night out in the yard—
the heavens glowing with rough stars.
A star-beam like salt upon an axe,
the water barrel brimful and cold.

A padlock makes the gate secure,
and conscience gives sternness to the earth—
hard to find a standard...

"I love rabbits,' you're supposed to say
around a bonfire when wind blows smoke
in your face. Admit it—you love rabbits—
and the air, previously unaware
of your existence, relents and lets rise
the kind sting, absorbing, acidic
to the slightly alkaline glaze of your eyes.
The...

Mid-morning, a girl and dog attend the woods,
the lilies of the valley just shy thin shoots.
The Boy Scouts' flying squirrel huts are crooked
after last night's storm, and the woody vines tangled loops,

depending. Girl palms the oak she calls half hers,
two...

The boys box-out in twos, shuffling on the balls
of their feet like they got the ghost. They circle us
in a race confined by lines, like we playing
around the world in grade school. We cool enough
to shoot craps and wager Mary...

My brother still bites his nails to the quick,
but lately he’s been allowing them to grow.
So much hurt is forgotten with the horizon
as backdrop. It comes down to simple math.

The beach belongs to none of us, regardless
of color, or money....