Double.

Smith, Ron

Double

   Three and a half decades now, and my heart still tightens
   because I'm trotting giddy toward checkout
   in the Old Gothic Gym, my precious punchcards
   fanned like a royal flush-Ryle,
   Russell,
   Beckett, Kant, Fielding--when they vanish

   up into a huge fist stared at by Coach Dole, autocrat
   of linebackers and foghorn stupid. How long does it take
   to read "PhilLang," "Epistemol," "BritNov,"
   ContemDram," "Aesthetics," and the others?

   When his eyelids droop, something with sharp fins
   banks in my stomach. My face burns. "Smitty,"
   he fogs down at one of the cards, "Can't take this class.
   Be late to practice on Wednesdays."
   A ceiling fan
   helicopters his head like Vulcan's halo.

   My entire aching life holds its stinking breath.
   "That's the Senior Seminar in my major," I say.
   He pushes those big, empty eyes at me.
   "Change your major," he says. "Major in sociology

   like Dimmski and Dollard." In this memory I reach up
   in silence like Augustine stealing a pear from paganism;
   I pluck my cards from the fat fist; I wade through
   the heat to the long table near the door.
   I have bled,
   benchpressed, blindsided, wildcatted, wedgebusted,

   whacked, crunched, crashed, crapped in my pants at
   practice, pissed in fourth quarter huddles, piled on and
   been piled up, been All-American stomped and gouged.
   I have farted in my own face. I have bounced my brain
   against my own skull, have squatted, squashed, broke-down,
   bearcrawled, duckwalked, slashed, swooped, and by God
   levitated, I have trapped, kicked out, blitzed, and firestormed.
   I have forearmed ferocious forever,
   eternally bang-up
   butted, have split giant triple teams, lips, chins, supraorbital

   ridges, sprinted and wheezed and puked and puked and
   sweated and puked for ten fall seasons, year-round training,
   seven hellish, heroic springs. Though you zombie the zone
   of the well-rung bell, though they stitch you all over

   like Shelley's Monster, though you break the breakable,
   sprain the sprainable, dislocate the dislocatable, it is best
   to keep your swollen mouth shut and play the hand Mars
   and Minerva have dealt you. None of the coaches ever spoke
   again of my education. In 1970 I came fifteen minutes late

   to practice one day a week and slipped on down
   the linemen list. But, I told myself, I've still got
   Philosophy and British Literature.

   I thought
   my double major was my secret, my ace in the hole.