The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Tue 10/3/06)

Thighs

The very great, very tall, truly out of human scale basketball player has been injured – "a deep thigh bruise" –
and all his many fans including I admit me are worried: how can he play, as he puts it, at a hundred percent,
when it hurts to walk, not to say leap: if he can't even leap, how can his team not suffer defeat?

I leave the sports page, return with reluctance to page one, and read – (I couldn't bear to before):
a taxi driver in Afghanistan, a small man, five-two, arrested by mistake, hung by his wrists, and . . .
tortured: they don't want to say it, but tortured, by blows of his U.S. soldier-jailers' knees to his legs,

violent blows, countless deep bruising blows, hateful even to think it, for days, again and again,
and his tormentors, instructed to do this, obeyed, because, they were given to think, this wasn't torture,
torture is something with chains or flame: torture, they're told, "is something people like us don't do."

But then the obstinate taxi driver, who'd never confess he'd done anything wrong, because he hadn't, did,
do something wrong, died, of blood clots risen to his heart from the crushed arteries in his thighs –
his thighs, said the doctor who did his post-mortem, had been "pulpified," "pulpified!" like ground meat.

This week, with time to rest his injury, (a "Charley-horse," we called it when I played, it did hurt,)
the very great player is feeling stronger: "I'm at eighty percent of my game," he reports to the press,
and indeed his team wins, in a rout, I don't remember the score, but that's how the paper put it, "a rout."

C. K. Williams

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C. K. Williams's most recent book, The Singing, won the National Book Award for 2003, his previous book, Repair, was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and in 2005 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. His Collected Poems will appear in November 2006. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

http://www.blueflowerarts.com/ckwilliams.html

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RL

If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul

or words...

:hi:

words...

:hi:

RL

I see where Lucinda gets it now!!

thank you

the juxtaposition is gut wrenching

I reamin teachable...

:bowing:

RL

I learn something everyday on here...so really, it isn't a time waster is it:)