The Poet as Hammer Thrower

Tyrannosaurus Rex trapezoids,

thighs and rear, I am spinning.

Earth is spiraling; I want to keep

doing this. Cosmic. Interplanetary.

Zen. I am Mercury. I am Venus.

No, I am Harold Connolly, ribboned

in Olympic gold from Melbourne, 1956,

ballet slippers designed by my Irish mother,

a vaudeville dancer. Confined to a seven

foot wide concrete circle, not fourteen

lines of a sonnet, I pirouette, whirl, lance

the hammer maybe three stories high,

a football field long, then the yelp. If only I’d

overcome gravity like negativity, my hammer

would never touch ground. The secret

is the pendulum, the system: centrifugal force

created when I begin to rotate and speed up

to sixty miles per hour, gripping a four foot

wire attached to sixteen pounds of hammer.

Twirl four times, no prodigy, I can’t get

away with three, I lean back, sit in space.

Arms are stretched straight because,

to borrow from physics, the longer the lever,

the farther the throw. For me, it’s kamiwaza,

Japanese for super human feat, or divine

work like words lined into a single eruption

of 8 mm film spooling onto the tile floor.

I have been known to crutch through a poem,

but centered, brute strength or no, I can’t

muscle the hammer forward. Like fingers

probing my spine to rotate me through the tango,

it is a guide, tries to show me how to avoid being

banished from festival fields because weight

of my subjects pock lawns manicured like sestinas

and villanelles. My hammer in hand, I am a leaf

shedding a globule of rain that quick silvers

a glissando down the center vein. Green,

the tip unbends. My heart and hammer

are one. Transcendent. Then the thud.

© Copyright, Vivian Shipley.
All Rights Reserved.