Albert Goldbarth's "After Yitzl" from Many Circles

"In this story-in-my-story they say, 'I love you,' and now I say it in the external story, too: I stroke you slightly rougher as I say it, as if underlining the words, or reaffirming you're here, and I'm here, since the gray in the air is darker, and sight insufficient. You murmur it back. We say it like anyone else-- in part because our death is bonded into us meiotically, from before there was marrow or myelin, and we know it, even as infants our scream is more than the teat. We understand the wood smoke in a tree is aching to rise from the tree in its shape, its green and nutritive damps are readying always for joining the ether around it-- any affirming clench of the roots in soil, physical and deeper, is preventive for its partial inch of a while.

So: genealogy. The family tree. Its roots. Its urgent suckings among the cemetarial layers" (2).

"Which is what we did with love, you and I: invented it. We needed it, it wasn't here, and out of nothing in common we hammered a tree house into the vee of a family tree, from zero, bogus planks, the bright but invisible nailheads of pure will. Some nights a passerby might spy us, while I was lazily flicking your nipple awake with my tongue, or you were fondling me into alertness, pleased in what we call bed, by the hue of an apricot moon, in what we called our life, by TV's dry-blue arctic light, two black silhouettes communing: and we were suspended in air" (3).

"I've seen each friend I have, at one time or another, shake at thinking how susceptible and brief a person is: and whatever touching we do, whatever small narrative starring ourselves can bridge that unit of emptiness, is a triumph" (3).

"We grew fat on pickled herring in cream, and love. I suppose we looked jolly. Although you could see in the eyes, up close, there was a sadness: where our families died in the camps, where I was never able to find time for the poetry-- those things" (13).

"But nothing is ever over-- or, if it is, then the impulse is wanting to make it over: 'over' not as in 'done,' but 'again'" (15).

Execution, by Edward Hirsch

The last time I saw my high school football coach

He had cancer stenciled into his face

Like pencil marks from the sun, like intricate

Drawings on the chalkboard, small x's and o's

That he copied down in a neat numerical hand

Before practice in the morning. By day's end

The board was a spiderweb of options and counters,

Blasts and sweeps, a constellation of players

Shining under his favorite word, Execution,

Underlined in the upper right-hand corner of things.

He believed in football like a new religion

And had perfect unquestioning faith in the fundamentals

Of blocking and tackling, the idea of warfare

Without suffering or death, the concept of teammates

Moving in harmony like the planets — and yet

Our awkward adolescent bodies were always canceling

The flawless beauty of Saturday afternoons in September,

Falling away from the particular grace of autumn,

The clear weather, the ideal game he imagined.

And so he drove us through punishing drills

On weekday afternoons, and doubled our practice time,

And challenged us to hammer him with forearms,

And devised elaborate, last-second plays — a flea-

Flicker, a triple reverse — to save us from defeat.

Almost always they worked. He despised losing

And loved winning more than his own body, maybe even

More than himself. But the last time I saw him

He looked wobbly and stunned by illness,

And I remembered the game in my senior year

When we met a downstate team who loved hitting

More than we did, who battered us all afternoon

With a vengeance, who destroyed us with timing

And power, with deadly, impersonal authority,

Machine-like fury, perfect execution.