Threesome

The Gender Gap

There have always been athletic women, but there’s no better marker of gender equality during the past thirty years than the rise of women as sports fans. Gaudy T-shirts and logo-ed baseball caps are common enough to be beneath comment, and the glass ceiling of tiresome arguments has been shattered. At long last high-pitched women have assumed their mantle and proven, time and again, they can be just as obnoxious as men.


The Obvious

The damndest part about this whole thing, living, is that every mistake seemed right at the time. Every wreck of a marriage made sense once; and we can really make believe that every horse race we shied away from was as free of risk beforehand as it seemed to the people who threw down money, or lives, and won on it. I used to talk myself out of chances to win real-life cross country and track races all the time because . . . I’m not sure. But behind every act of sabotage was the hope that I’d be broken by it, and so could finally start to heal from the awful melancholy I’d find myself in. There were always reasons, even if they seem pale now. Sympathy is nothing more than understanding this, that mistakes are rarely mistakes, but right decisions proved untenable when life shifted.


The Calculus of Desire

There’s no branch of mathematics more antithetical to human desire than calculus. That a petty drip of halves and fractions might run away to infinity before we were ready, or that a series of swoons and leaps might sum up, in the end, to exactly nothing, is a wisdom that even mathematicians face only in symbolic language.

Light, unrelated poems

Ugly Ego Ugly

Gunther thinks bollocks of his orange hair
and Luther of his score.
Hilda hides a one-haired mole,
Molly gapes six-foot-four.

Frank smiles piebald teeth, not white,
though straighter than Denise's.
Janet's breasts cannot fill cleavage;
she loathes her slutty nieces'.

The mirror upholding their reflection
that self-doubt has good basis,
they blush and pick the scab, panged
for lost Platonic faces.

Yet as Confusius said, no thought
once thought escapes the narrow
needing to hold it to ourselves,
bone concealing marrow.

Our flaws are ours, my flaw is mine,
and in defense these debts
bluff and wind into self-myth;
self-myth abides no threats.

The impotent, the halt, the bald:
we abhor our genetic store.
But balder? Halter? More impotent?
We hate him all the more.

Egos can be ugly, yet
the ugly breeds an ego
that stakes his I alone the louder
the sooner he should go.



The Woe of the Camel Breeder: A Haiku

"Prude dromedaries,
Unlike fecund bactrians,
Need at least three humps."



Ode to Ben Johnson*

Shots of epinephrine (or "adrenaline")
or norepinephrine ("noradrenaline")
so vault the decathlete's chance to win,
lengthening leaps and stretching hope,
that he'd stupid not to dope.

So neither norepinephrine (noradrenaline)
nor epinephrine (adrenaline), then,
can write its chemical signature in
the bloodstream of an athlete who
wants to be cheered in the next meet, too.

Yet if either epinephrine (adrenaline)
or norepinephrine (noradrenaline)
will inescapably taint the urine
of Hans or of Helga (who can tell?)
why chant and chance that chemical spell?

Because neither norepinephrine (noradrenaline)
nor epinephrine (adrenaline) can
unprogram a twenty-year clawing to win.
The mind hears an anthem, and no one planned
a tenth-second past ascending the stand.

*adrenaline and epinephrine are chemical equivalents, as are norepinephrine and noradrenaline

The Turnover of Centuries

If the Universe is as cold as we're led to believe, then it should have been impossible to read about myself in a two-hundred year old book. But after I lost her -- despite the turnover of centuries, despite the cultural shifts that should have hacked away at any connection between the author and myself -- I found the story whispering back to me. I had lost her, and amid the suddenly gaping hours to fill, I found that the book and I could speak to each other like no one ever had with me. It stunned me to see how precisely my thoughts were echoed between every line when I wasn't bothering to read the words on the page.

That Gangly Man

If Lincoln, that gangly man
Who lost and lost, had lost again
--If he had not been the President of Presidents
Would he still hold a residence
In Heaven's hall of genius? Precedence
Excludes extending that fame, that flame
To any unrecognized name:

So metaphysically,
If he had died obscure and free,
--If he had slipped away unseen by us,
Would that negate a genius?
And what must such a state of man mean to us?
Would not the speeches still be there,
Though we were unaware?

If his Emancipation
Had never reached its proclamation
--If there were no one gathered that he might address,
Would it have meant less?
Or is a piece of genius qua genius
It must break through the crust, it must
Be seen by us, it must?

We want the answer,
We want to answer no.
Want with our hearts to answer no.

What Euclid Wore

Using just hexagons, six-sided figures, it is impossible to construct a closed, three-dimension surface. No matter how many tiles, no matter how you twist or pinch them, no matter how ingeniously you piece them together—if you restrict yourself to hexagons, there will always be a gap. Water would pour right out. The tiles will never quite fit.

Had Euclid been a tailor, he might have derived a similar law for human beings. Into certain articles of clothing, certain people do not fit. I saw today a 20 year old whose power suit made her look a saggy 55; and yesterday spotted a woman so anemic that I was tempted to call an ambulance. She had fine red hair, but the fire-red pants she wore bleached all color from her skin. Men with thick hands always look restless in formal wear, and I myself look like two cones balanced tip to tip if I wear my shirts tucked in. Like the hexagons, certain bodies and certain clothes dash against each other and will not fit. It’s wiser to accept sartorial law and stop condemning people to style. Some wear suits as naturally as their hair. I do not.

The Hide of a Griffin

I am wary of fashion--I can’t don a new one each spring like a coat. It’s better for me to feel recognizable in old clothes than to feel like a caricature of style in new ones. I used to see pictures of griffins or other chimera stitched together from the lobes and limbs of different animals and wonder how they kept from stumbling all over the place. Wouldn't a beast with a cheetah's brain but the legs of a bear and a camel's hump on its back be necessarily clumsy? I no longer need to wonder: it's exactly how I feel whenever I try to wear tomorrow’s trends today.

Ode to the Ball in the Basket

Until they make them better
By printing them on wood,
Any rejection letter
Will do more harm than good.

Wood blocks might be drop-kicked
Or splintered into parts;
Or propped on a fence and picked
Off in their missing hearts.

But even crumpling twice
Our letter-ragings lack
Catharsis for a vice,
From one smart jab or smack.

Weak-kneed, wilty paper
Can never satisfy.
Frustrations never taper
So verses multiply.

So editors aloft,
To Sap the Sappy Flood:
Be generous, be soft
But please send firmer wood.