Fourth and Inches

  For foreign readers, you should know that in American football, teams try to advance the ball ten yards (a little less than ten meters) in four tries (or downs).  Most of the game is a tangled chaos of arms, and legs, and bodies - and the ball is placed after each play by pure guesswork.  But if a team is close to the ten yards, suddenly the game becomes an exact science, and the officials bring out a ten yard long chain to see if the team has made it far enough.
   "Fourth and Inches" would mean that the team came up just a little short after three tries. They would need to decide to either kick the ball to the other team or try one more time to get those last few inches. (If they fail, the other team would get the ball closer to where they want to be.)
   As I hope you can tell, though, this poem comes to be about more than football.

    Fourth and Inches

After all those approximations,

we pretend to be precise

and bring out the chains,

buy the ring, write the will

then replay every thing

until we think

we’ve got it right 

and come to accept

as absolute

the purely arbitrary.