The Score
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It’s love love because neither
has served. They just showed up on the court, he in his shorts, she with a new tube of balls. Love all because they don’t know the rules. Nobody’s yet explained that this is a competition. Someone must lose. They’re standing there in visors, beaming at each other over the net when the kid in the cream polo with the weed whacker yells Hey, this your ball? It’s love love and they’re sitting on their baselines. They’re not sitting. They’re reclined, looking up, net between their heads as if it fell from the sky to divide them. It’s love all when she swipes her racket through the air and it goes wish, wish. |
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Postseason
–after James Wright
As Titans, we were coached to bleed
purple and white. We were told to
leave it all on the field. We did
as told. After we were through
galloping terribly into each other’s bodies
and withdrew to the gang showers,
our pickups, cul-de-sacs, beds, after
the halide flood lights were killed
and the idiot moths scribbled
back into October chill,
it gathered itself up on the fifty-yard line.
It drifted to the sideline
where our fathers had run the chains,
slid over the track’s backstretch
beneath aluminum bleachers
and down the unmown hill
into the bottoms we entered only
to fight or paw or be pawed or be,
and there spread itself like an exhalation
around the trunks of trees.
Before our tailback, coach’s son,
pulled the gun from his glove box,
you could still hear it
if you went there early enough
and sat in grass wet with dew.
It made a sound like crows.
Now there’s a scar on the hill
where the gas line was buried
and you can’t hear a thing
over the lawnmowers.
As Titans, we were coached to bleed
purple and white. We were told to
leave it all on the field. We did
as told. After we were through
galloping terribly into each other’s bodies
and withdrew to the gang showers,
our pickups, cul-de-sacs, beds, after
the halide flood lights were killed
and the idiot moths scribbled
back into October chill,
it gathered itself up on the fifty-yard line.
It drifted to the sideline
where our fathers had run the chains,
slid over the track’s backstretch
beneath aluminum bleachers
and down the unmown hill
into the bottoms we entered only
to fight or paw or be pawed or be,
and there spread itself like an exhalation
around the trunks of trees.
Before our tailback, coach’s son,
pulled the gun from his glove box,
you could still hear it
if you went there early enough
and sat in grass wet with dew.
It made a sound like crows.
Now there’s a scar on the hill
where the gas line was buried
and you can’t hear a thing
over the lawnmowers.
Ted Mathys is the author of three books of poetry, Null Set (2015), The Spoils (2009), and Forge (2005), all published by Coffee House Press. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Poetry Society of America, his work has appeared in American Poetry Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. He studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and now lives in Saint Louis, where he teaches at Saint Louis University and co-curates the 100 Boots Poetry Series at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. His website is www.tedmathys.com.
Orit Raff attended Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design in Jerusalem, graduated cum laude from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and participated in the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1998-1999. In 2003, she completed an MFA at Bard College. Raff’s work has been exhibited widely in Europe, Israel, and the United States. It is part of major collections, such as The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; Wellesley Museum, MA; CU Art Museum, University of Colorado at Boulder; Albright-Knox, Buffalo, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv, Israel. The artist is represented by Julie Saul Gallery, New York and Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. For more information, please visit www.oritraff.com.