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Clacking Home From High School In My Rugby Cleats

Clacking home from high school
in my rugby cleats, metallic castanets
clicking like crickets on the cement sidewalk,
battered, soiled, blessed. The anger
expurgated by violent body contact.
Knees, green, bleeding. Grass stains,
mud. My black and gold-striped jersey,
a wasp. I'd see them, on their backs,
perfectly intact, the filaments of
their black legs extended like oars,
delicate fossils of tv aerials,
looking for better reception in death
out in the open. Death, are you
still vulnerable? -scuttled lifeboats
where anyone could crush them,
the mysterious beetles, heritage jewellery
that seem to die for no reason.
An old woman drops a brooch.

Iridescent greens and pigeon pinks,
rainbows on oilslicks. Were they
scarabs of immortality in another life,
rolling the world up into a ball of dung,
pushing the sun along, little engines
with black holes big enough to sink it
like a cue ball, a marble of light?

Millions of years of random variations
in evolution estranged us. Was I
as much an alien to them at this
dangerous bus stop of a planet?
Unknown destinations, the seriatim
of a vague beginning elusive as a ghost
in the prenatal shadows behind us
the only bond between us? Or was
something against us both as
sentient life forms straight off the boat?

A common enemy that built a bridge
to gap the spark plug with light years
of stars firing us both up like a car
on a cold morning, lacquering its valves
with hot lubricants? I didn't look
under the hood to see if beetles
have blood, but they had life and that
was taken from them as mine will be.
Their coffins were open as lockets
someone had torn the pictures out of,
unrevealed secrets, maple keys of love.

I was tough at the time. Fit. Proud
of my broken bones and scars,
a successful initiate into young manhood,
uncowed by my energies. I could
carry the ball without dropping it,
negotiating a labyrinth of contusions
and collisions in broken field running patterns
that brought the crowd to their feet.
I made the try. I got the ball off
down the line. I drop-kicked the field goal.
I was a cosmic egghead with knuckles
and books of astronomical poems
that weren't all that easy to crack.
In the world's eyes, I'd earned the right
to the madness in my hermeneutic solitude.

Nobody watching, I'd dig a hole
with my finger in the unwalked
boulevard grass. I'd pick them up
like a crane on the wharf of a drydock
and lower them into their graves
out of respect for dead metaphors.

I'd cross two blades of grass and say
a small prayer over them and
send them on their way, as I to mine
not knowing whether we shared
the same gods or not, if any, but feeling
the silliness of the gesture wasn't
lost upon what might be circumspectly sacred
about standing in rugby boots
and glorious bruises, burying beetles
like lifeboats in a grave whether it made
the slightest difference to bugs, gods or people
what was destroyed. What was saved.

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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