The one the child must use inside a train, His own absorbed face held where he stares From this sealed, well-lit minor world as night Falls upon pass-through places known by name Only through an image of himself staring Through himself at the only world he knows.
He can�t help himself, despite the warnings After his voice rises without his hearing The sounds of his words because he had to Feel the speed with which passing through All that is stone metal shadow lights bodies Happens. But he�ll get used to it, the trembling
Showing itself in everything, and stops Forcing people into people, strangers Rushing away to wherever they have been Off lit platforms beside the waiting tracks Which point to everywhere they can go, Reduced to seeing out through themselves through
Themselves at others like them opposite, Who are nearly there before they are gone, While another world assembles itself Behind glass moving into another world. He could tell them what he knows with his inside Voice. But he will keep this to himself.
HOOPS
It is no secret Despite what you thought. It is the science of motion: The wrist set back Like a broken cup,
The ball sliding up Over the open palm Into the waiting nest Of muscle memory And practiced hands;
As his limbs uncoiled His body would rise Through the release Natural as a breath Before his descent �
With such backspin And arc the net Would hardly move And no rim or backboard Would be needed,
You know, knowing You are not him, As you bend your wrists And knees one more time To shoot, and shoot again.
THE HAWK
The hawk changed by the second Each scrap of grey Ohio sky With the difference of its motion
Over the leafless trees and fallow Black earth of early winter Around that interstate we drove
After we buried him. I thought A griever�s thought: It�s a message, A quick, half-conceived thought
Trying to become belief. As if The dead spoke in miraculous flight Almost too quick to see�as a bird
Then a bird of prey. He�s gone. That�s the cold truth. Stop thinking That hawk followed something.
Pete Mackey is the author of Chaos Theory and James Joyce�s Everyman (University Press of Florida), has written for numerous university presidents and other higher education leaders in America and Ireland, and now lives and works in central Pennsylvania.
