Since I have cultivated a dislike for football
for as long as I can remember, never playing
or watching, and since I can make nothing
of the nomenclature of X’s and O’s my coach
friend obsesses over like a monk in his cell,
I carry the quip I read in a magazine years
ago declaring that football practices and perfects
the two worst things in American culture:
violence and committee meetings,
but the afternoon I slapped that phrase across
the overly intense, fully uniformed student’s
face when he would not, I mean, would not
stop interrupting my analysis of Wright’s Pollacks
and their long beers—he loved that part—
to tell me there was no terrible galloping,
but only the glory handed down to him by his father
through the rusted truck nights tossing hay
at the river, and running into padded practice
trees cut down now to pay the mortgage to keep
the heifers in their straight, formidable lines,
their backs a drooping chain measuring
the distances gained and wished for; it was then
I realized his older brother drove the truck
through the parking lot flying the six foot
Confederate flag from the bed the day after
Obama was elected, and I now know I said it
because I wanted to bruise something unpadded
within him, to make swell and ache the mischief
that is his with the mischief that is mine,
the sorrow that is his, is mine, and I realize
that I lied to him, I did play football once in fifth grade,
because I loved the teacher who was the all-time
quarterback, a huge man throwing a ball
at small boys running wild on a field without lines.