for Mike Webster, 1952-2002
Were math still a function
he could execute, he might
round it up to twenty five
thousand times that he dug
his cleats into the dirt
at the line of scrimmage.
He might recall that each
huddle was followed by two
snaps: the first as his wrists
flicked the pigskin through
his oak-like ankles, followed
half a second later by the other
snap when his helmet cudgeled
his pate. Less than a decade
after his retirement he could hold
no thought much longer than most
plays last from hike to down.
His frontal region abraded, scar
tissue piled up behind his ever-
widening glabella like an offensive
line working against the clock.
Buried beneath the lesions near
his parietal bone, hidden inside
the calcified creases of his motor
cortex gleams reflections
of the four rings he reaped
by mistaking his mug for ram’s
horns, his sons’ voices chipped
off and collected in muddy
pockets between eroding
sutures. Those last years of life
his sentences fell like fumbled
passes. Without any savings
or medical insurance he had
to set his own rotten teeth
into his gums with crazy glue,
used electrical tape to hold
together two ramshackle
femurs. Fans on the street
might brush by him, nudging
him to share a locker
room fable, until he halted
them by pleading for someone
to help him figure out where
he lived. Even shaving
and brewing coffee became
tasks as impenetrable
as his shoulders once were
whenever he aimed them
like howitzers toward the end
zone. Swathed in a jersey
that swayed him to believe
he was steel, he left the field
as a hobbling mausoleum
decimated from two hundred
Sundays spent sacrificing
his skull to the gridiron
for a job that paid him above
the going market rate
to delete himself.