Catchers in baseball, closest to cousins
in your differentness, the safeguarding home, the healing bones,
the serious gear (which ought to indicate the possibilities),
and only one of you.
Denied the leap and dash up the ice,
what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monk
and cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhere
as they contemplate their narrow place. Like saints, they pray for nothing,
which brings grace. Off-days, what they want is space. They sit apart
in bars. They know the length of streets in twenty cities.
But it’s their saving sense of irony that further
isolates them as it saves.
Percy H. LeSueur, for one, in a fitful sleep,
flinching at rising shots in a bad light, rubbers flung
out of the crowd, insults in two languages, finally got out of bed
in a moment of bleak insight, went down and burnt a motto
onto his stick, Haec est manus quae ictum deflecit—
“This is the hand that turns away the blow.”
Or Lorne Chabot, in 1928, when someone asked
him why he always took the trouble to shave before a game,
angled out a leg to check a strap and answered in a quiet voice,
“I stitch better when my skin is smooth.”
Or dapper Charlie Rayner, who stopped a bullet
with his chin, another couple of teeth and some hasty
work to close an ugly cut. Back the next night, he takes another,
full in the face. A second night in a row, he’s down, spitting
bits of tooth to the ice. “It’s a wonder,” he mutters,
“why somebody doesn’t get hurt in this game.”