amphibi.us » Ron Yazinski

Curves

Shannon Peil — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 17:58:38 +0000

When my son was twelve, he was a good ball player on a poor team.
The other kids threw off the wrong foot,
And crossed their hands when they held a bat,
And had to be told to go to first base if they ever got a walk
Because they couldn’t concentrate long enough to count to four.
And so his team lost,
And lost almost every game by the ten run mercy rule.
And each time, hurting with my son,
I’d try to put it into perspective.
I’d console him that it’s just a game,
That if he was playing against these same kids and there weren’t any uniforms
And if there weren’t any parents around,
And if the same exact game happened, pitch for pitch, out for out, nobody would care.
The kids would just set a time to meet the next day and go home to dinner.
And he would nod his head trying to make his father happy.

But in the last game of the season, against the top team in the league,
He pitched his best game.
Throwing mostly curves,
Even though he knew he was too young to throw them,
And wincing with every pitch,
He made the other team look helpless,
As if they were trying to hit a bat with a broomstick.
There was strike out after strike out.
And even the few that were hit,
Were scratched right back to him for easy plays.

At the last out, his teammates threw their gloves and hats in the air.
In his joy, the little second baseman poked himself in the eye.
All except my son, who walked into the empty dugout
And with his pained right arm began to fuddle with the laces on his plastic spikes.
When I saw him, I hurried over and asked what the problem was.
Nothing, he said. Then why aren’t you celebrating?
“Dad, every time we lost, you said it was just a game.
“It’s just a game when we win, too.”

© Ron Yazinksi, 2011

[others]

Yellow Breasts in Barbados

Shannon Peil — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 19:00:43 +0000

Near dawn, after the whistling frogs give up on mating,
And fall silent,
The ululating of the morning birds begins.
As soon as the pool side bar opens,
Several yellow breasts
Land on the opened bottles of rum and bob at the lips,
Until they’re shooed away,
Only to immediately return.

As I sit in the sun, sipping my second rum punch,
It occurs to me that, eons ago,
With their first glint of consciousness,
The dinosaur ancestors of these yellow breasts decided against it,
Taking to flight instead.

And for our part, what has self awareness brought,
Other than circumcision,
Which reminds us not to eat our young?
It has taught us how wrong it is for yellow breasts to drink rum.

© Ron Yazinksi, 2011

[others]

Abington Nocturne

Shannon Peil — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:27:18 +0000

These hills hold more than coal.
There must be veins of diamond.
How else would promises still echo,
A generation after they were said?
How else would images stretch in the air,
As if reflected from one mirror to another to another,
For all this time?

On the way to a friend’s house, last Saturday,
I passed a pond where I saw again,
That I was never young.

Take that long ago night we swam naked in the warm moonlight here,
And nothing happened.
We used the joints we shared as an excuse,
And the fear we’d get caught trespassing,
And then the freezing water,
Though your nipples didn’t show it.

And though we kissed,
It was with the desire of eating the raw vegetables that were good for us;
So we dried quickly and nervously laughed,
As we did when we found the term paper we had misplaced.

You said you admired me for my control,
That I could stop whenever I wanted to,
Like a well-trained dog that will let you take food from its mouth.
You even said, as we drove back to town,
You were relieved, because
You could hear the whimpering of a child in the back of your mind.

But we were in our prime,
And the evening was ours.
But rather than confront a lack of inclination,
We both believed I was responsible.

© Ron Yazinksi, 2010

[others]

Hot ass

Shannon Peil — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 22:35:57 +0000

We weren’t tough,
Not like the Navaho kids who stood ten steps apart
And took turns pelting each other with stones,
Until the loser was knocked down;

Or the Mohawk kids
Who threw knives at each other’s feet,
Trying to get as close as they could without breaking the skin.
And the winner was always the one with bloody feet.

Our games were more civilized.
In the twilight, when it was too dark for baseball,
We would meet in the empty lot down by the river.
While the rest of us would close our eyes,

The oldest kid would throw a long stick as far as he could,
And then the rest would go looking for it.
The thrower, out of this round, would tell us whether we were getting
Hotter or colder as we searched the knee-high grass.

The first kid to find it would yell “Hot ass,”
And then have the right to whack on the behind any kid he could catch
As we raced back to touch a tree which was our haven.
Woe to the fat slow kid,

Whose only defense was yelling out “Hot ass,’
Even if he didn’t find the stick,
So that the other kids would start running away
And give him a few more moments to locate it himself.

And thus we learned the basic rules of life.
You win by inflicting pain.
You lose by receiving pain.
And only fraud gives you a chance.