Pool Poetry

Eric Green, fine artist, poet, novelist and pool player living in Belfast, Maine has permitted me to publish two of his poems regarding the game of pool on this blog.

Thank you Eric.

REQUIEM

4 games down in a race to 7
He was working the felt good
And the 9-balls kept falling.
I fired a fresh cigar
And banked a few table-length,
No nerves--I ran one and
Took the set from the hill.

My hands now never to hold again
This scepter of twenty-five years,*
This poolroom prince of hard wood,
This maple shaft green with chalk
And the sweat of my aging fingers
(from the age of fifteen to forty).
Worn thin over these many years
It rent a sudden splintered cry,
A snap that rang as disbelief:
For who wants to believe
The death of one's youth?
Or that a friend could
Break your cue?

And my youth rushes fore
As numb sadness fills, and
Just as the wood is two pieces
So am I now disjoined from this,
This part of myself I thought eternal.
Never to feel that same weight again,
Never to feel the smooth leather grip
The slap into my palm on a hard stroke,
Never to turn the brass screw into
The brass joint to make a whole.

Forgive these foolish sentiments
For a mere stick of polished wood;
But is that not the hardship of death,
The certainty that it can not be again?
With pathetic and shaking hands
I place this broken cue upon my mantle
As if it was an urn of ashes.

*Willie Hoppe, serial number 526

EPITAPH

pool/ ta/ble, n. a billiard table with six pockets,
on which pool is played. [1855-60]

This useless distance I deem to go
Take these words from me
As I have no use for them.
What use have I for this moment?
There to rest in the dusky expanse
Of an upstairs mill-town poolroom;
Someone forbid this 4 o'clock January calm,
This brooding torpor of 7 dark pool tables,
The green trapezoid of one lit surface
(this chalky bright green that
seduces like a naked mistress,
this smooth level cloth where
all is finally true and fair,
my hands here to make me
either a dunce or a god.)
And to drift across this hallowed light
The big grey smoke of a cigar, to drift
Toward that pearl white column, past
The silent unplugged jukebox, my eyes
To the neon BOLEHCIM in the adman's
Ever white and red, the fluorescent gas station,
And that thin gold nimbus, that vibrant last light,
Behind the beer sign, above the vibrating gas pumps,
Surrounded by the dark pool hall: that final
Distance of the evening sky.

On some frozen January afternoon
Scatter my body's ashes here,
When only the ghosts of dead players
Float like thinning cigar smoke.
Then light one pool table for me
Just till the living appear,
But keep the billiard felt free
Of my ash: for it may none defile.


A sampling of Eric's art can be viewed here ~ http://www.artsforge.com/green.html

Eric Green lithograph prints for sale ~ http://www.artsforge.com/ericgreenprints/price_list.html