Poem-A-Day: Tackle Football by Dan Chiasson

December 30, 2013 Tackle Football by Dan Chiasson     Snow up to our waists and coming down still.  There was a field here once, when we began.  We marked the end zones and set up the goals.    Now nobody can even move, much less tackle.  I am Ganymede fleeing on a temple frieze.  We stand around like lovesick Neanderthals.    We're Pompeian before Pompeii was hot.  We have the aspect of the classic dead  Or of stranded, shivering astronauts.    It was early in the era of the pause button:  We paused and paused the afternoons away  Indoors, blasting our ballistic erections    At the blurred bikinis of celebrities,  Then, splaying on the linoleum floor,  Awaited the apportioned pizza delivery.    Now, someone has paused us, or so it appears, But they didn't pause the snow, or the hour:  As the one gets higher, the other gets later.        Copyright © 2013 by Dan Chiasson. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem  "The VCR became a fixture in my friends' houses at precisely the moment in our lives we got extremely horny. The pause button allowed for sustained scrutiny of, say, Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High--but there was a cost: her image became grainy and indistinct. When you possess something, inevitably it loses its lustre. The snow falling is Frost, the idealized Vermont; the pizza and the linoleum are truer to the Vermont of my particular childhood." --Dan Chiasson Most Recent Book by Chiasson   Bicentennial (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)                Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.     Dan Chiasson is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). His fifth book, Bicentennial, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf in 2014. Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College.   Related Poems Days of Me by Stuart Dischell Screening Desire by R. Zamora Linmark For the Man with the Erection Lasting More than Four Hours by John Hodgen __________________________ Love reading Poem-A-Day? Help support it today.     Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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