The Paris Review

1. Alexander, first over the wall,
collapsed battered by stones. Instantly
the Macedonian companions
gathered their shields over his body
and these athletes of honor and brawn
withstood repeated iron assault--
to defend, to survive, to triumph.
When the King's wound healed, he divided
the known world among his companions.

2. At the center of a baseball is
five pounds of cat intestines, pressured
into a tiny marble-sized sphere.
While I write "Baseball," Ada the cat
rubs at my ankles to inform me
that nothing whatever bothers her.
Jennifer and I make love at night;
afterwards, something good continues,
as if the radio, turned on low at

3. three A.M., told about a baseball
game all night long in Japanese or
Spanish, with the crowd noises intact.
The next morning, as Jennifer stand
sat the kitchen sink staring out the
window, I gaze measuring her ass.
Then she squeezes an orange: Its bright
gelatinous membranes rupture to
fill her blue cup with sunny ichor.

4. The ship made twenty-five knots
into a fifty-knot wind over hot Gulf
water. I climbed to the topmost deck,
tilting my weight into the hot wind,
poising my heavy body into
the wind's weight, pulling myself along
rails with both hands to push against wind
that scudded black clouds into blackness
with the moon down and few stars showing.

5. Wind flattened my beard and my nostrils.
Wind gathered my shout and shuffied it.
All night the kitten walked back and forth
on our bodies biting and poking.
Meantime the old cat sniffed, hissed, and sighed
to lifelist many disloyalties;
as when the Dodgers left Ebbets Field.
It is ecstasy beyond pleasure
to watch Jennifer squeeze orange juice.

6. So the new dog's pet is the kitten.
All day she hurls herself at his huge
muzzle, bigger than she is, her mouth
wide open and her claws stretched. He snaps
without biting, love-bites; she pauses
in her fury to lick his jaws clean.
Then she hides--to leap from her secret
place onto the great boa of his
wagging magnificent golden tail.

7. All winter now aged ballplayers
rehearse their young manhood, running and
throwing under Florida's sunshine,
but remain old. In my sixtieth
year I wake fretting over some new
failure. Meeting an old friend's new wife,
I panicked and was rude. Or I ache
mildly feeling some careless anger
with my son I cannot turn away.

8. The bodies of major league baseball
players are young. We age past the field
so quickly; we diminish, watching
over decades, applauding the young
who come and go. The old cat hisses
at the kitten and pokes the new dog.
Her life is ruined and she will sink
bitter into death. At night she purrs
briefly, lying restored on our bed.

9. The leg is the dancer and the mouth
the sculptor. The tongue models vowels
or chisels consonants. Pause, pitch, pace,
and volume patina a surface
of smooth shapes the mouth closes over.
Behind our listening lips, working
the throat's silent machine, one muscle
shuts on/off/on/off: the motionless
foot and thigh of the word's world-leaper.