from kayak issue no. 22
junkfish by the millions
Junkfish by the millions perish
to be canned for the sake of cats
so that tennis racquets can be made out of the cats.
At my acrobatic backhand downbeat the batted ball bounces
just out of reach, chromatic progression with an almost
flat trajectory:
I break your serve! I break your serve!
My purpose is persuasion and frontal assault without
deception.
The court is seventy-eight feet long by law, always.
The moleskin wrapped around the handle of my racquet
is not real.
As a rule we are shod with old horses, play chess on
cherry trees
with elephants, and kill the two kingdoms for food.
My second serve
is no less passionate than the first (a fault)
(a foot fault).
One fellow found a poem in the fact that "love" is "nothing".
You can play for money or for love, so that love is nothing
only because it is not money. That certainly makes sense.
Sodium trichloro-acetate mixed with hot water killed the grass.
It ate the sneaker right off the groundskeeper's foot, too.
The white lines are two inches wide (baseline four).
Sunday morning, a stubborn shred of sausage lodged
between two back teeth,
a snatch of car-radio hymn lodged in the mind. The stove
and toaster smoked,
and something a good deal like smoke even came out
of the refrigerator.
I try to draw a rhinoceros and produce instead
a perfect hippopotamus
What have I done? (On the kitchen blackboard, I mean,
next to the shopping list, Sunday morning.)
My Olympic Champion athletic supporter will be fourteen
years old next April.
Fish die, cats die, cotton dies, and I am faked
completely out
by your unexpected violence. The net is strung on a steel cable
kept in check by means of a pawl-and-ratchet mechanism.
My backhand becomes more awkward, deuce by deuce.
Our fifth set
is tied at twelve-twelve, and I must not lose. Lord,
I absolutely must not.
