A marginally better NaPoWriMo #2

I posted a poem yesterday, true. But it wasn’t all that it should have been. So here is another NaPoWriMo day 2 poem, this one about the final that was won yesterday.

The watching of a cricket match

She scratches labels off bottles piece by piece,
throws them in the air, reads auguries in their fall.
One time, she held her half-full stein up to stare
at the screen through its amber. She flays
the air with her limbs, lends her voice to chants,
pausing only to ask, “Is that the queue to the loo?”
She sits still, legs closed; her spine, a taut
exclamation waiting its turn.

Your legs bend around table legs. Your back,
a stoop the crowd pats on occasion. Your hand
a crab scuttling across the table, searching.

She finds prophecy is easy. When the crowd hushes,
she bows her head, embarrassed. “I didn’t do it”,
she whispers. She finds a hand and grips it hard.
“We will win, we must win, what else is there?”
The hand agrees. She loses breath, reclaims it
from the crowd. She smiles at strangers,
laughs when they laugh back. She catches
a tired eye here, a dying cough there; runs
a nail over her face to know it is still her own.

You hear yourself muttering encouragements.
Your beer is flat, you gulp it down. Your grimace,
a gargoyle in a sea of expectation.

When it ends, there are explosions outside.
She throws herself into the crowd. You see her,
a flapping tentacle in its body now flailing,
now tangled in a hug, now falling to the floor.
The crowd breaks, she waits a moment too long.
A defiant pillar in a ruin of tables. Her eye, a gleam.
When she steps out, you stand with her
and howl into the night. The road howls back.

She traces the death of fireworks on your arm,
you see the road stand still in a traffic jam.