Ever since the middle of this past week, I’ve found myself intermittently mumbling to myself a phrase from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins and two lines and a sliver of a third from one by Elizabeth Bishop.
Hopkins’ phrase concerns a bird in flight: the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Bishop’s lines are the last two of a poem about a tremendous fish she caught:
Everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go.
Lucas Reed was my student two years ago in freshman composition and a year ago in world lit. I think of a phrase from a poem of Yeats when I think of Lucas: high courtesy. Lucas is polite and attentive, in and out of class. It’s a pleasure to know him.
Lucas and I have something in common. We are both lefthanded quarterbacks. I quit the seventh-grade football team after a couple of weeks. My career thereafter was confined to the sandlot, not that said career wasn’t an illustrious one. I hit my speedy brother Richard on many a touchdown pass in sundry fields in Gulfport, Mississippi.
Lucas is a college quarterback. Last season the Sinisterslinger, as I came to call him in world lit, starred on the gridiron. The fellow throws a tight spiral! And stylish! O, my, it’s a pleasure to watch him throw a football, be it a real one or a nerf one.
Lucas stops by my office, once in a while, just to ask how I’m doing and say hello. When we’ve time and the weather’s good, we repair to outside The Bugtruck, toting a nerf football I keep in my office for such occasions.
Our game goes like this. We initially stand a yard or so away from each other. One throws the ball to the other. If the other misses it, the game’s over. If he catches it, each player takes a step back and the game continues. We play until someone has dropped a catchable ball or what’s deemed an uncatchable ball has been thrown. We try to collar someone to ref for us; otherwise, Lucas would deem any ball I dropped uncatchable and any ball he dropped catchable. Lucas does not condescend to his elderly erstwhile teacher by throwing games. He’s too much compounded of high courtesy for dirty pool such as that. He does his best. But he’s not a very fair ref, deciding against himself as he always insists on doing.
As we began our best two-of-three this past Wednesday afternoon, Lucas spotted Tarrod Collier, a wide receiver on OBU’s team. Tarrod agreed to ref.
I played pretty well. All three games took us far away from each other. I surprised myself by still being able to throw the ball somewhere ‘twixt thirty and forty yards. I lost the first game. Lucas “lost” the second one when he failed to catch a ball after taking two steps toward it (the rules say you’re only supposed to take one) and trying to rake it up as it was nearing the pavement. Lucas claimed catchable, and Tarrod backed him up. They ganged up on me.
The rubber match was the best game of the three. Back and back we went, further and further away from each other. I couldn’t quite reach Lucas on my last throw. Lucas took an illegal two steps forward and caught the ball. Tarrod did not rule it uncatchable. The game continued.
Hopkins’ poem is one in which he admires the flight of a bird:
the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Elizabeth Bishop can’t help letting the tremendous fish go. He’s an obvious veteran of wars with prior anglers; five old pieces of fish-line hang from his lower lip. She admires him too much to keep him.
Lucas made his next throw. Up, up, up it went into a bright blue April sky, on a bright blue April afternoon, in the Year of Our Lord 2017. It was so high and was spiraling so tightly. As it descended, I realized that it was right on the money, was heading precisely for a certain septuagenarian’s chest. All that way it had travelled, and it was landing exactly where Lucas intended it to land!
I couldn’t help it. I stopped being a competitor. I became a fan.
….the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow….
And I dropped the durn thing!
As we headed back to The Bugtruck, I yammered on about how I’d just become too much of an admirer of the throw to attend to what I was supposed to be doing.
Tarrod told of a similar situation he’d been in last season, when he was wide open and Austin Warford, another OBU quarterback whom it’s been my good fortune to have in class, had hit him with a similarly perfect throw.
“Did you drop it?” I asked.
“No, sir, I caught that sucker!”
by Dr. Johnny Wink, Professor of English
