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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476524" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Clacking Home From High School In My Rugby Cleats</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476524" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Clacking home from high school <br>in my rugby cleats, metallic castanets<br>clicking like crickets on the cement sidewalk, <br>battered, soiled, blessed. The anger<br>expurgated by violent body contact.<br>Knees, green, bleeding. Grass stains, <br>mud. My black and gold-striped jersey, <br>a wasp. I'd see them, on their backs, <br>perfectly intact, the filaments of <br>their black legs extended like oars, <br>delicate fossils of tv aerials, <br>looking for better reception in death<br>out in the open. Death, are you <br>still vulnerable? -scuttled lifeboats <br>where anyone could crush them, <br>the mysterious beetles, heritage jewellery<br>that seem to die for no reason.<br>An old woman drops a brooch.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476524" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Iridescent greens and pigeon pinks, <br>rainbows on oilslicks. Were they <br>scarabs of immortality in another life, <br>rolling the world up into a ball of dung, <br>pushing the sun along, little engines<br>with black holes big enough to sink it<br>like a cue ball, a marble of light? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476524" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Millions of years of random variations <br>in evolution estranged us. Was I <br>as much an alien to them at this <br>dangerous bus stop of a planet? <br>Unknown destinations, the seriatim<br>of a vague beginning elusive as a ghost<br>in the prenatal shadows behind us <br>the only bond between us? Or was <br>something against us both as <br>sentient life forms straight off the boat? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476524" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">A common enemy that built a bridge <br>to gap the spark plug with light years <br>of stars firing us both up like a car <br>on a cold morning, lacquering its valves <br>with hot lubricants? I didn't look <br>under the hood to see if beetles <br>have blood, but they had life and that<br>was taken from them as mine will be.<br>Their coffins were open as lockets <br>someone had torn the pictures out of, <br>unrevealed secrets, maple keys of love.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476524" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I was tough at the time. Fit. Proud <br>of my broken bones and scars, <br>a successful initiate into young manhood, <br>uncowed by my energies. I could <br>carry the ball without dropping it, <br>negotiating a labyrinth of contusions <br>and collisions in broken field running patterns<br>that brought the crowd to their feet. <br>I made the try. I got the ball off <br>down the line. I drop-kicked the field goal. <br>I was a cosmic egghead with knuckles <br>and books of astronomical poems<br>that weren't all that easy to crack.<br>In the world's eyes, I'd earned the right <br>to the madness in my hermeneutic solitude.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476524" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Nobody watching, I'd dig a hole <br>with my finger in the unwalked <br>boulevard grass. I'd pick them up <br>like a crane on the wharf of a drydock<br>and lower them into their graves <br>out of respect for dead metaphors. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476524" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I'd cross two blades of grass and say<br>a small prayer over them and <br>send them on their way, as I to mine<br>not knowing whether we shared <br>the same gods or not, if any, but feeling <br>the silliness of the gesture wasn't <br>lost upon what might be circumspectly sacred <br>about standing in rugby boots<br>and glorious bruises, burying beetles<br>like lifeboats in a grave whether it made<br>the slightest difference to bugs, gods or people<br>what was destroyed. What was saved.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a></strong></div>