Nationwide Hankering on a Saturday in Fall
No ticket takers wait at the gates.
The marching bands have stayed away,
even the drum majors too diverted
to finish changing into their uniforms.
The cheerleaders cavort somewhere else.
Somehow the special-team players
maintain the discipline to assume
their positions on the field, their coaches
and teammates irked with themselves
for showing up, the football upright
on the tee, the referee kissing his whistle
as if it were his wife’s responsive tongue.
All the tiered seats remain vacant,
every loyal fan at home in bed
or out of sight in a tent uphill
from the hiking trail or down
in the lower stacks of the library
or in a discount-store dressing room
or—denial turning to urgency—
on one of the cleared backseats
in the all-but-empty stadium lot…
The kick-off returner does his duty
but fantasizes about what he’s missing
when he catches the ball. He’s hugged
to the ground just shy of the fifteen
by an opponent who’s slow to get off.
Unlucky sportscasters and their shrinking crews
watch the game—their only viewers a few
of the prepubescents of the countless parents
who found no sitters available but TV.
Offensive holding occurs on every play
and, with the miserable officials never throwing a flag,
every possession’s sustained into a scoring drive.
| William Aarnes |
|
levelheaded: Nationwide Hankering on a Saturday in Fall
It’s hard not to fill in the gaps of a poem whose simple, mysterious narrative lets it seem like a kind of weird allegory. What, for example, is this “nationwide hankering” for? And, why do “[a]ll the tiered seats remain vacant?” There is anticipation among certain people for the beginning of football (or any sport’s) season, but where the title of Aarnes’s poem points to this kind of unimportant, innocent expectation, the body of the poem points elsewhere, as if amid the “hankering” we feel for seasons or birthdays or weddings, there is also a more general, guttural recoiling from the misperceived importance of what are actually trivial moments. Put more obviously, an event may feel important but may be unimportant. On the other hand, this event, a football game, feels unimportant (hence the absence of fans) but may actually be very important.
Taken even more broadly, the poem is about subjectivity. Despite an apparently “nationwide” hankering, our great group of ticket takers, marching bands, cheerleaders, and fans are not all off parading for a righteous social cause or even toward a collective goal. Instead, they are defined separately by their absence and the effect it has on the event that would give them their respective titles (a “ticket taker” isn’t a “ticket taker” if he isn’t taking tickets).
If the poem is about this absence, it is also, by implication, about the places we do go to when we don’t go somewhere else. What does a “ticket taker” become when he stops taking tickets? The speaker doesn’t let on what he seems to know, and that mystery is a large part of what opens the poem to various readings. That mystery is what gives the poem its allegorical quality. For instance, amid all the disinterest in the game, the “[u]nlucky sportscasters and their shrinking crews” seem to turn the poem toward an almost politically-minded comment on the dissolution of old mass media. That we begin with the “ticket takers” more than implies that there is no entry into this “nationwide hankering” but one that is unpaid-for and thus illegal. And what does it mean that “with the miserable officials never throwing a flag, / every possession’s sustained into a scoring drive”? Could there be a deft, subtle censure of the global financial system in there somewhere? Maybe. Maybe not. Each of these conclusions has been jumped to from an imaginative distance. Reader participation is fun, but the point is not to tediously proclaim that the poem is open to interpretation. Instead the point is to show that a poem can use this kind of openness for more than spooky atmospherics or as a stand-in for subtlety. A poem can use this kind of openness as a direct challenge to readers to “maintain the discipline to assume / their positions on the field” and not to take the easier route and just “cavort somewhere else.”
– The Editors
