Suicidally beautiful galloping sons

GO SO YOU CAN COME BACK

                                    by Jared Harel

Go so you can come back,

says my wife, meaning go but don't linger

in frozen foods, or forget

where you parked, or chat up the cashier.

Go, certainly because something

needs getting while our daughter takes a nap

and the snow isn't snowing,

and here are some coupons that happen

to be expiring, so go before all the produce

turns soft and stringy,

and school lets out, and a tallish boy

hawking fruit snacks

by the entrance wins you over, and you throw him

cash, your wallet, everything for the sake

of his under-funded football team

because though you never loved football

you love James Wright's poem about football

and solitude, and those suicidally

beautiful, galloping sons

and go because I love you, though I also love

those parmesan pop chips,

and to love is to leave

room for longing, but come back

so that we might go out together, later,

in a perpetual rotation of goings and comings

which require nothing but patience

and faith that when we go

we remember where is home.  

From The American Poetry Review, January/February 2015.

AUTUMN BEGINS IN MARTINS FERRY, OHIO

                                        by James Wright

In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suidically beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/autumn-begins-martins-ferry-ohio