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On The Flying Trapeze

Sam Keen Ponders How To Be Free

I think trapeze could provide an excellent liturgy for a new society. Our present public liturgies, like football and basketball, are a kind of ritualized violence. One side has to beat the other. In trapeze, men and women cooperate to create something of transcendent beauty. A great trapeze act is a kind of performance art. Like a Navajo sand painting, it shows you something of exquisite beauty that lasts only for an instant and then is gone.

Father’s Day

Anniversary Of My Father’s Death

For you, Dad, I turn on the ballgame. // It doesn’t matter which game, exactly, / does it? // So familiar, the way you spent the long hours / of your freedom, soaking up the drama, huge / warrior men in combat, lifting themselves / out of the mud

The Girl Everything Was Done To

She’d been abducted by a man she described as “dark, maybe a foreigner,” and held at an abandoned farmhouse in a remote section of woods, fairly close to where I lived. She had been raped by this dark stranger.

Soccer Until Dusk

Omega Baseball

I had come to the Omega Institute, an adult summer learning center in the Hudson River Valley, on a lark, intrigued by a catalog description for a workshop that promised to integrate baseball with yoga, meditation, and martial arts.

Triumphs

Trophies, embroidery classes, office hours

Mickey Mantle, Mother, And The Secret Service

It’s August 1995, and Billy says the Mick is as good as dead. My brother counts one, two, three on his fingers: “First they give him a new liver. Then the cancer they missed eats up his lung. Then he dies.”

At The Window

I am standing at the bay window in our living room, watching my son walk down the street. I am Nathan Gold, son of Morris, father of Jeffrey. I am Nathan, son of Rose, husband of Jacqueline, father of Jeffrey.

Light Polarized, Pored Over