Tackle Football
Snow up to our waists and coming down still. There was a field here once, when we began. We marked the end zones and set up the goals. Now nobody can even move, much less tackle. I am Ganymede fleeing on a temple frieze. We stand around like lovesick Neanderthals. We’re Pompeian before Pompeii was hot. We have the aspect of the classic dead Or of stranded, shivering astronauts. It was early in the era of the pause button: We paused and paused the afternoons away Indoors, blasting our ballistic erections At the blurred bikinis of celebrities, Then, splaying on the linoleum floor, Awaited the apportioned pizza delivery. Now, someone has paused us, or so it appears, But they didn’t pause the snow, or the hour: As the one gets higher, the other gets later.
Copyright © 2013 by Dan Chiasson. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on December 30, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
"The VCR became a fixture in my friends' houses at precisely the moment in our lives we got extremely horny. The pause button allowed for sustained scrutiny of, say, Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—but there was a cost: her image became grainy and indistinct. When you possess something, inevitably it loses its lustre. The snow falling is Frost, the idealized Vermont; the pizza and the linoleum are truer to the Vermont of my particular childhood."
—Dan Chiasson
Dan Chiasson
Dan Chiasson was born in Burlington, Vermont, on May 9, 1971. He received his BA at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he double majored in English and classics. He received his PhD in postwar American poetry at Harvard University.
Chiasson has authored five books of poetry: The Math Campers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020); Bicentennial (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); and The Afterlife of Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2002).