And it does a dissolve into the look of a soccer field after a game—the last three or four players walk slowly away, their shin-guards muddy, their cleats caked, one player dragging a net bag full of soccer balls— the players seem to have known what it was all for yet now they look somehow depleted and aimless there at the field's far end

Saw that after the Chel$ki v Wrong United game today, and I'm reminded: Fuck helmetball. Right United's home opener five weeks from last night. I can't wait. Promo vid better with enhanced 102 fever app, yo.

Though here's the point of this post:

In no order other than I'm going down the left blogrolls first, here are, as best I remember, the new additions since the last BAD: Nothing to Say and Saying It, Tom Clark, From Wine to Water, Stalin's Mustache, (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography, SOUTH/SOUTH, Written Word, Spoken Word, Departure Delayed, Your Man for Fun in Rapidan, Though Cowards Flinch, Big Bald Bastard, Leftwing Nutjob, Indiscriminate Dust, Anarchurious, I Ain't Drunk, Just Drinking, The Aboniblog, Pied Cow Blog, diary von davidly. Check them out. Be Kind.





THE MISSING POEM

Mark Halliday

It would have been dark but not lugubrious. It would have been

fairly short but not slight. It would have contained a child

saying something inadvertently funny that was not said by my daughter,

something strangely like what your daughter or sister said once

if you could remember. The child's voice flies across

a small parking lot where, in one of the cars,

a man and a woman sit listening to the silence between them.

The child's voice probably hurts them momentarily

with a sense of beauty apparently very possible

yet somehow out of reach. In the missing poem this is

implied, conveyed, transmitted without being flatly said.

And it does a dissolve into the look of a soccer field

after a game—the last three or four players walk

slowly away, their shin-guards muddy, their cleats caked,

one player dragging a net bag full of soccer balls—

the players seem to have known what it was all for

yet now they look somehow depleted and aimless there

at the field's far end; and a block away on a wood-grainy porch

the eyes of a thin woman sixty-three years old search the shadows

in each passing car, as the poem recalls what she wants to recall.

Hours later the field is dark

 

and the hills are dark and later even Firehouse Pizza has closed.

In the missing poem all this pools into a sense of how much

we must cherish life; the world will not do it for us.

This idea, though, in the missing poem is not smarmy.

Remember when you got the news of the accident—

or the illness—in the life of someone

more laced into your life than you might have thought;

the cool flash of what serious is. Well,

the missing poem brings that. Meanwhile not seeming like

an imitation of Mark Strand or Mark Doty or Mark Jarman!

Yet not like just another Halliday thing either.

Instead it would feel like a new dimension of the world,

the real world we imagine. With lightness!

With weight and lightness and, on the hypothetical radio,

that certain song you almost forgot to love.