Sir Henry Raeburn, “The Skating Minister”
Sports Saturday
I’ve got a great skating poem today to honor the Olympics, but first here’s an aside on Michael Sam, the SEC defensive player of the year from the University of Missouri who has become the first openly gay man to declare for the NFL draft. If you want to know what Shakespeare would have thought of gay athletes, check out this past post on Puerto Rican boxer Orlando Cruz. There was a time, you’ll discover, when people thought of gay men as macho, not effeminate—and that certainly is the case with Sam.
And now on to Philip Darcey’s poem about the skater below the ice. If you’ve ever had the sense that there is another you, more real but just out of reach, this poem’s for you. Notice how the poem glides along:
Skating
By Philip Dacey
Skating on the surface of my life,
I saw myself below the ice,
another me, I was moving fast
above him, he was moving slow,
though he kept up. There must have been
some warp of being twisting
us together so, two different speeds
head to head, or feet to feet, or
better, shoulder to shoulder, brothers,
that’s the way it felt, but separated
by a death, an ice, a long wall
laid down upon the world to lock us
into rooms. Knock, knock. Are you
there? He was, and waving, though
it was a distant wave, an outer-space
wave, as if he were umbilicaled
and drifting off between the stars. The stars
skated on that ice, too, and went so fast
they seemed not to move at all. Perhaps
he was the one sped swerveless home,
an arrow, while I dream-skated,
my two blades, for all their dazzle,
leaving the ice unchanged, and top was
bottom and bottom top, but who could say?
I only knew I wanted to break through.
I wanted the ice to melt to let
us sink together, two lovers in a bed,
or crack, a warning sign missed, while
the stars swam around us like fish
lit up from within by something
we could never name, nor wished to,
lest the light fade. But the ice held,
because it was wiser than I was,
because two is more than twice one,
because the air and water made a pact
to disagree while I skated on
the surface of a life I thought was mine.
