Title: Sport 18

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, April 1997, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 18: Autumn 1997

Ken Bolton

Ken Bolton

page 171

Voice

(for Laurie Duggan)

You dial the extra numbers
& talk to an American, a mere
acquaintance, who, having picked it up
holds the receiver to his ear & wonders
Who is the flake on the other end
talking to him, as it turns out,
in American?

You know two languages

—Yours & his—

correcting ‘footpath’ for example,
which sounds too pastoral
(Gainsborough, Hobbema, some rococo nut), to ‘pavement,’
& feel, in the effort,
tinnier, more fake, like
a bad ventriloquist
making conversation.

Now ‘pavement’, on the other hand, doesn't
that suggest too great an awareness
of facture? the obdurate & material?

‘Sidewalk’ suggests use-value better.
These are the pleasures of translation.

And the pleasures of communication?
page 172 Best to sound simply foreign—
let them figure you out.
To them the pleasures of translation.

They imagine you
with your sheep & your mobile phone,
crook resting somewhere bosky
(against a rock or tree), near the path
your feet have worn, that foot path—dialing,un-
idiomatic—a kelpie nearby,
panting. You are the centre of his faithful eye.

Or they see you, maybe,
as Chatterton in that painting—

still 18th-century—

imagining you,though,Iimagine,
more upright (infuriating
to be be babbled at
by someone,
feet above their head,
relaxed while you are puzzled.
Like a teenager!).

But that is how they imagine you.

The date, too, would explain your stilted quality;

& the fax machine
—the phone, computer terminal etc
(that inhabit this Chatterton's ‘pad’)—explain
the fact of communication: a European vision
in the South Pacific—explain too the disembodied voice—
your own—you now hear say:
‘Hullo Tony?’

page 173

Poem Ending 'A Gray In
Which Some Smoke Stands'

It is getting
late
at night.

I read—
beside a
person who is sick—

the poems of
Jimmy Schuyler,
sick in hospital.

Jimmyis in hospital
—we are at home,
the light

placed low
beside the
bed. A

warm glow
emanates from it
onto the red eiderdown,

that is flecked with white—
patterned with it, actually—
quite regularly,

but in a way that seems
fluxive
and irregular

—at least
page 174 when the eiderdown
is the least disordered.

It is in the bottom right
of my field of vision—
and close, because it's

‘over’ me.

Red underpants
on top of a pile that is
black jeans

—in another corner—

glow
brightly
too.

Cath shifts
beside me
occasionally.

I read another poem, just
yesterday, about how good
Schuyler's are.

(The Payne Whitneypoems
are stoical
but

—the best thing
about them—
don't misrepresent his feelings, don't

make more of them—
and so seem
very actual.)

page 175

The poem I read yesterday
was by David Shapiro.
Ashbery, I remember, was for a time called

‘the master of the golden glow’

—some sort of joke.
I read it, I think, in a poem
of Schuyler's.

The glow here
is sort of ‘golden’—
warm,anyway.

I write this poem,
saying
how good Schuyler is

—not the first such
I have written—

with the thought, Maybe it will
get it ‘out of my system’.
Not

that I expect it to.
(The thought, though, does occur to me.)
I write the poem.

Wishing
it could be like Schuyler's—
‘The sky slowly/swiftly went blue to gray.

A gray in which some smoke stands’

is how it ends.