Austin's poem

Courtship

The excessive politeness of tennis: the compliments.

Good shot.  Great return. The apologies

for a lucky break, the ball barely falling over the net.

And after a long rally clapping the face of the racquet

in admiration, the strings hard against the palm,

thrumming like a muted instrument.

But towards the end she wouldn’t make a backhand

compliment, wouldn’t stretch to make a shot.

Got bored with close games

Thirty all.  Deuce.  Her advantage

or mine and back to deuce again and again.

The long sets, with no tie breakers.

So I called good anything close she hit out.

She took it, never offered to replay the point.

My placement improved

as I tried to put every serve,

every return within easy reach.

Anything to keep her playing.

I thought she liked love games

where she beat  me without mercy,

where she scored every point:

fifteen love, thirty love, forty love.  Game.

Love meant nothing.

I’d hit wild and long and blamed the wind,

hit the racquet’s frame on the concrete court.  And banged

my racquet against the metal fence

around the courts in City Park

as if in anger after she aced.

Then towards the end of when we met our match

in marriage, that other game we played,

we put our son inside

a portable playpen

on the edge of the court,

the game by then a kind of babysitting,

watching him watching us, the ball, our swings,

our final follow throughs.

The double faults,

the lets. The strange concatenation of the nets:

his mesh pen an extension of the net between us, the chain-

link fence around us, the racquets’ interlaced strings

we examined as if one had broken

after every stroke.