Mascot
People file in admiring the long, shaved legs of cheerleaders. People sit in the stands surrounding the glossy wooden-floored court. Leather balls bounce and fill baskets with scripted sounds. The band plays everyone’s favorite song from the student section where boys and girls personify patterns in painted faces; where everybody’s pretty in the mirror. Wandering about in tall boots and tight jeans is a bearded boy in a plaid shirt. His beard is made from someone else’s hair, someone who died making love in a small Ohio town. He seems out of place and walks as if the seasons are changing around him. He passes a trio of little girls who point and cover their tiny mouths confining their cackles. The boy scratches his beard with an axe that he somehow snuck past the elderly security guard. When he unveils his small teeth, the little girls’ faces turn into doughy meat. People in holiday sweaters stare at the boy as he meanders to the front row of the student section. His axe now a focal point. As the referee tosses the ball into the air, the faces around him go drunk with distortion. He tugs on his suspenders, raises his axe and yells TIMBER.
| Noah Falck |
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levelheaded: Mascot
It’s no more than a description of a minor event preceding a basketball game, and yet what a strange and wonderfully detailed poem this is.
Take a moment like “Leather balls bounce and fill baskets with scripted sounds.” It’s tough not to hear the warm-up shots before a basketball game in the early alliterative “b” sounds followed by the swishing “s” sounds of the final phrase. The line is lent further depth by the idea that these sounds are “scripted”—by the players who’ve practiced making them, by the physics of air resistance and the science of sound, and finally by the poet, who has presumably chosen his language very carefully to “script” the scene at hand.
Part of what the poem seems to do is test this ability to “script” a little world. On first reading the poem, we found it a little scary. A boy has brought an axe into a gymnasium where “little girls’ faces turn into doughy meat.” Ugh. On subsequent readings though, it’s clear the boy is the titular mascot (perhaps a Mountaineer or Highlander or Lumberjack) doing his mascot job. Still, the violence of the scene, at least the shadow of violence, is tough to deny. When this speaker tells us “His axe [is] now a focal point,” all else goes silent. This is as suspenseful as a poem gets, and the blend of comedy and aggression that follows—his tugging on his suspenders and yelling “TIMBER”—blurs the line between our daily exposure to even the silliest caricature of violence and real, horrifying brutality.
The poem doesn’t want us to forget that even in our most daily human moments, we are still mysterious creatures. From the depilated legs of cheerleaders to a boy whose “beard is made with someone else’s hair” we’re reminded that no matter how we manipulate ourselves, parts of our humanity are “scripted” and parts are inexplicable, even beautiful. What does it mean to “personify patterns in painted faces”? How does one “walk as if the seasons are changing around him”? And why would a mascot’s axe need to be “snuck past the elderly security guard”? All good questions, we think.
– The Editors
