S.KRAUSE

Sonnet on a hockey puck

Oh how we knew not its reflective skin
Or the curve and line of its rounded facade
Under which hid resin we could not prod,
Whose material held the desire to win.

And upon the shimmering ice it lay,
At rest and singular, hibernating;
Until, its jet coat tingling and waiting,
Time began, the clock ticked: it entered play.

Violent strokes set it upon its flight.
Slaps, smacks and pokes infusing it with might
It charged ahead on the end of a stick.

A devil in black jersey steering luck,
Against the keeper its speed proved too quick:
Yet another fell to the mighty puck.

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Notes: In May of 2001 Laura Smith, a Canadian colleague of mine who lived in the same apartment complex as I, asked (or dared) me to write a poem about a hockey puck. This grew out of our discussions about The Stanley Cup Finals and hockey in general. The result is a classicaly structured sonnet modelled after Rilke's ``Archaic Torso of Apollo''.