MindSpinner

The smell of the boys’ locker room -
pungent sweat soured -
comes as no mystery when you stand with the players
at the edge of the football field
your camera in hand
in case a play stampedes close enough
for the chance of a good shot.

You stand only as high as these boys’ chests,
and you rather hope they notice you are there
when excitement takes them.
They are rapt, they are wrought with
alternate agonies and ecstasies,
and they are dripping.
Behind you, the noise of the crowd
and the approximate music of the pep band
crescendos, subsides and crescendos again.
Coaches’ barks and bellows
sound across the field
like cannons in the 1812 Overture.

Above the glaring lights
and the sober scoreboard,
in the velvet night,
the moon hangs still - a shimmering,
cratered pearl, like a pendant.
And as you walk outside the yellow fence
to the far side of the field,
straw-colored September grass sweeps
round the shoulder of the hill like a shawl
and falls alluringly away
toward the woods under the moon,
into the sound of crickets.