The Loneliness of the Solo Goalie

Give her a name, Hope Solo. 
You couldn’t make this up.

A sentinel at the gate of her domain. Keep out.

Let others scramble the field 
like upper body amputees.

She’s got their 20 arms like tentacles, 

snatching, deflecting; a snarling Cerberus, 

beware her tooth and claw.

Hope, where there’s life there’s always….

Alone she prowls from pillar to post

strutting and fretting in her petty space.

She is Garbo slurring, I vant to be alone.

Then, Virginia Woolfing a room of her own.

Solitary as a poet leaping stanzas, stretching 

the orb of a word, the bounce and roll,

In another century she was Coleridge in his

Stately pleasure-dome decreed , uninterrupted

by the person from Porlock barging in.

Is she Kubla Khan dreaming Xanadu? No,

she is Euclid thinking angles 
down measureless caverns

imagining apertures into her habitat.

Zig-zagging a solo sax from the Bird

or Ornette Coleman out of the box,

out of his mind, with a mind of his own.

She’s faster than dwarf Pluto coming at her

She gets in the kicker’s head, freezes her.

Hope faces the Axis, World War II. Like Rosie

she rivets, blitzes Germany, sinks Japan,

drinks from the Woman’s World Cup.
Futball they call it. Soccer, we say 
and are exceptionally alone.
We have our own football played with arms
and got the bloody word from the Brits... 
Soccer, from AsSOCiation Football. 
Then they dropped it but we didn't 
because we are exceptional. 

You can’t make this stuff up.