Perfect Hit.

Smith, Ron

Perfect Hit

   Coach Wells, Coach Kitt, Coach Miller, Coach Leachman--
   they all yelled War! Even soft-spoken Coach Horne,
   who more often said, You got to shoot for the stars, son--
   even Coach Horne said it:
   Football is war.

      I would have died for them,
   nearly did in those days before water breaks, hovered
   close you could say in the blank oblivion of concussion,
   when they told me my name, laughed,
   and sent me back in.

      But even then I knew
   football wasn't war, winced, truly, when the fans shrieked
   Kill him, never let my players say that when I coached.
   No, I wasn't aiming to kill anyone, just put them out
   of action, persuade them

      this life hurts too much
   when you try too hard, always trying for the perfect hit.
   Got one in ten mainly disheartening seasons and seven
   brutal springs. One. In a minor blizzard
   on a freezing mountain top

      in West Virginia
   I knew he'd never see a wedge man attacking
   instead off dropping back under the kick. I reached him
   before he turned his eyes from the tee, and it was perfect--
   explosion all the way through and up,

      not a twinge
   of pain, not even a jar, I swear, inside my helmet,
   and he arced and flopped all loose on the crappy Astroturf
   and just gave like a dead man when I stuck him automatically
   in the chest. I bounced

      and turned and got another,
   a pretty good blindside before the whistle, that limp nothing
   already giving me the creeps the way it does right this second,
   a tingle at the base of my skull. I'd made up my mind
   that Vietnam summer

      I'd go to jail
   before the jungle. My dad, my age on Guadalcanal,
   didn't say he'd never speak to me again,
   but he sure as hell didn't say another word
   that weekend.

      I told Coach Haupt, Doolittle, Karsarda:
   Watch this and they did. We danced like devils
   on the sideline while trainers carried that wet flag
   of a boy away from us into a dark rectangle.
   And I think this only now, off here
   in the second and maybe last American century:
   that they disappeared
   into a small sky of unmoored stars
   drifting softly down.