Lacrosse League and Cats

Eric Torgersen

 

THE CENTRAL MICHIGAN MEN’S OVER SIXTY WOODEN STICK LACROSSE LEAGUE       declines, with good reason, to come into being, but who will deny me this vision?                                                            At attack, the indigenous warriors of baggataway  who under the guise of a contest stormed the British garrison at Michilimackinac and slaughtered all inhabitants but the French.                                                               At midfield, the tireless marathon runners of Ethiopia.   On defense the poets— if they guard, tough as teeth, the American tongue— and my captain, Walt Whitman, you.   In goal, in the charmed circle of the crease, my father— inviolable by rage and love alike.   And if so then surely one day me also, his inheritor.

CATS   The caged panther pacing Rilke’s poem is dead at the heart.    Rilke loved walking barefoot on grass and “air baths,” the fashionable nudistry of the day, but above these the museums, zoos, botanical gardens of his old Europe’s great cities.    The young panther caged where the hunger artist died is radiant with life-force, hence terrible to Kafka, but its prospects are poor.    For my poem the cougars that stalk now, I’m told, the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, right here.

 

Eric Torgersen teaches at Central Michigan University. His most recent books are Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker (Northwestern UP) and Inside Unity House: The John-Paul Story (March Street Press), a chapbook-length poem.
 

Photo Courtesy of morgueFile.

 

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Poems Copyright © 2006 Eric Torgersen. All rights reserved.