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by Adam Phillips Darren Daulton crouched behind the plate, ligaments in his knees crackling like campfires in a primordial forest. he'd been pulled from the shadowed alleys of Philadelphia and pushed squinting into the Miami sun, like a broken nose on a mannequin, like glass on the beach. warming up he caught without a mask, spitting black through splintered teeth. at bat he ground down like an old man fighting with a rusted lugnut on a tractor wheel, muscling the ball into the right field stands. whyn't you do that in the game, asked the gawky kid, the million dollar kid, the kid just back from the All-Star game. that ain't my job, he said, looking like a tree stump in a coastal forest. looking like a man-shaped patch of forest. like molded loam and ligneous clusters and the moving shadows of living things. like a man who the woods had eaten. a frog in the throat of the woods. what is your job asked the kid, looking back to the other kids, the kids who knew enough to look away, to fiddle with the laces on their mitts. my job, said he, and the sky went black, my job, he said, and the blackness bulged, like bulbous eyes... my job is now or never. and the kids, their eyes like coins, for the first time then they saw the thousand dawns like burrs in your eyes. like handfuls of your hair. like a thousand staggering dawns staggering up off the beach at midnight. do this now said Dutch Daulton. do this now or die. you will die. you will do this, do this now, and/or you will die. and those boys, these pretty pretty boys grew teeth and took the field with hearts and eyes already punctured in their minds. Copyright 2016. All rights reserved. Want to comment on this story? Click Here to go the Literary Review Discussion Forum (for the subject, enter "Comment on poem Dutch") |