Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weight Lifting Man As the heat from the fire drew up the chimney, The flame pressing, brushing out the last thread, Constantly revising itself upwards to a pure line. --Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, “Woman Shoeing a Horse” In the city, in a room lit bright as a mortuary, I have seen a pure line held quivering between a man steeped in sweat and a weight, dumb, repetitive, heroic, and for that I ache. *

I don't love swimming enough to find a pool in NYC to swim regularly, but I do love swimming. The outdoor pool at Grove Hotel is small and cold. It is also too shallow at one end. Nevertheless, I swam happily for 40 minutes yesterday afternoon. This morning, turning round for another short lap, I remembered that my father taught me to swim, in the public swimming pool next to the Bukit Merah Bus Interchange. That pool, like so many things in Singapore, is gone. Behind locked gates, the empty pools stand like huge scummy cisterns. My father is not a great swimmer, but he knows the basics. School swimming lessons finished my swimming education. When I am swimming, I often imagine myself floating like a fetus in my mother. Since I am thrashing vigorously, and not floating, swimming combines the joy of independent action and the security of a womb.  Before my swim yesterday, TCH and I walked along the beach to the Pines. I love beach walks too, and this one by the Atlantic was especial...

Just one more post today. About the Mets versus Rays game I watched yesterday with TCH at the new Mets Stadium. The $850 million Citi Field is a beautiful structure, fronted by the Jackie Robinson rotunda. The steel girders rise above the brick walls in an impressive show of strength and aspiration. Inside, the passageways are bright and airy, lit and refreshed by the openness of the steel frame. It was Father's Day at the stadium. The big screen showed interviews of the players talking about their dads. The expected treacly stuff. The starting pitch was thrown by a kid, whose dad stood proudly by him. Fathers-and-sons won prizes sponsored by one company or another. The American genius for packing sports, entertainment and commerce into one enticing package. The whole Father's Day a-do affected TCH, who attended the game to distract himself from thinking he was not with his children on this day. We were supporting the Rays, the team his parents in Florida support.  At one point...

This is not so much a review as a response, since I am not a golf player and do not understand the sport argot that constitutes the material, metaphor and metaphysics of this ambitious book of poems. Reading this stream of mostly short, untitled poems, I am the small animal that leaps from floating log to floating log, finding a slippery hold on some comprehensible utterance before the water's momentum carries me forward again. The run is not only desperate, it is also thrilling. For despite the poem's obscurities to this reader the complex orchestration of voices, syntax, and lineation is extremely compelling, and I read the book from beginning to end with a rush of excitement. The book wants us to believe that golf is the Game of Life. The sport is a world of male camaraderie and competition, not only between men of similar ages but also men of different generations. The author, in his bio, explains helpfully that he plays frequently "with his father, his brother, his ne...

I went to my first ball game last night, at the house that Ruth built, in the Bronx. I had moved to the States five years ago, from Singapore, but got involved with a jock only in the last year. He played football in high school but baseball was always there, in the background, in the bleachers of Carbondale, Illinois, where he grew up and took off for New York. Just outside the B and D train station, also named Yankee Stadium, shops down one side of the road sold baseball uniforms, tees, caps and pennants. Earlier in the day, The Quarterback had tried to buy Tampa Bay Rays caps, but they were selling at a rip-off price of $35. We did not bother to check out the busy stadium shops. A few open-front bars, looking like beach bars, were crowded with pre-game celebrants. The new stadium was supposed to be nearby, but I could not see round the long dirty walls of the old one. A man, burly, balding, in his fifties, had attached himself to us on the train. He is from New Jersey, and, since he...