For Nadal at the French Open, 2009

This is a bad poem and not worth reading, and I have no right to expect to get away with it. However, I claim the Nick Andopolis defense because it comes from the heart. See his apologia on "Lady L":

Anyway, experts claim that writing about loss helps us process it and move on, so I took their advice and wrote a sappy poem about how much I love Nadal. The alternate title was "Is your green army jacket the only thing keeping you warm tonight, Robin Soderling?" The meter is an adapted sapphic.

Requiescat

There was no plain apocalypse of body,
Nor any sign of episodic rapture;
None of the tedium of nothing changing,
Nobody blinking

Uncomprehendingly at what must happen,
(Masters of mute apotheosis, tired of
Appetite like a plague of motion, even
Sick of its study)—

This time you burned too mortal in the pyre
(Though, unlike Heracles, your happiness lay
Not in becoming faultless but more fragile)
And with a full heart

Humanly willed the honor to a new man,
One who inherits only more defeat, for
Though he may seize your title, he can capture
None of your beauty,

None of its generous or separate heaven,
Where, by the shy intelligence of pleasure
Cast on deliberate reason, in your grief we
Turn to exalt you,

Not for the power or swiftness of your action

Or the precision of its instrument, but,
Pleading a fitter metric, for the friendly
Innocence in you:

Wonder that works like incorruption. So let
Others enjoy the accident of fortune;
Yours is a lasting reign for those who present
Love as your laurel.

Bless that boy.