There are only a few games played by a pair
That are more than games, chess being the most notorious,
Each move signaling an invasion of the other’s personality,
            psyche and life-style,
Which is why it is not played by football players,
    truckdrivers
            or housewives
But by students, physicists, autodidacts and idiot-savants, as
            many Masters are,
And is raised to Olympic status by cultures that hate one
    another,
And can never degenerate to the level, say, of “pingpong di-
           plomacy,”  
The contest as iffy as the Big Bang or Plato’s Cave.

Hours after a game a lover can say to the defeated,
You were only thinking of yourself, that’s why you gave up
           your bishop,
And the other may think, if I lose because I love you
It’s not intentional. You are better than I am.
But everything said is just another rorschach.
I need a new racquet, the loser jokes, and will buy a new
    board
Of inlaid wood or cloth-of-silk fit for a rani,
Making it all more formal, like evening dress,
As if it weren’t formal enough already.

He muses: I don’t want to win from you, I don’t want to
    lose
           to you.
My middle game is strong, almost professional,
But at the some point you whistle softly and move right
    through;
Damn, ineluctable bitch.

Did you know that before the fifteenth century
The queen could only move one square?
Did you know that the king used to jump all over the place
           before he was hobbled?
A hobby horse. All at once the power was hers.
It happened in Europe when they invented love.

The king stands still. Nobody lays a hand on him.
He just stands still in his mutton-chop whiskers, brainless,
    erect,
Wearing the medals with his own face on them,
His peasants all back in the coffin-box
And a helpless hamstrung horse, ripe for the knackers,
Dying, with crazy beautiful eyes like horse-chestnuts.

He muses: it’s only a game invented in Persia
Or some such place that doesn’t exist anymore,
And amends this to read—if it were only a game.

The bishops sidle down the avenues, the slippery diplomats
    with
           their penis-heads.
Those movable castles like panzers, so modern.
And oh the wild horses leaping over the powers,
You can almost see their delicate legs shrouded in pedestals,
Lifted by fingers of gentle giants.

Kings murdered each other over a chess match.
It says so in the manuals, and all the chess writers call it
A war-game.
                  They call it Errors of Appreciation
In the conventicles of war, by actual generals,
With a freudian assumption of an intention to lose.
To Clausewitz the word was Total War,
To Treitschke A Triumph of National Selfhood fit to
    conquer
            the world,
But all this war talk, Sicilian Defense, the Philador, coign of
            vantage, sphere of action,
The sacrifice, gambit means sacrifice,
All ends in a mate, a word that’s not even a pun except in
            English.

Checkmate means the Shah is dead,
In chess two queens can never meet,
Two kings can never touch,
And that’s the meat of the game, the theory of the play.
The war is only a side-effect of love.

What really matters are the sounds I hear
When you clear the board and put the pieces back in the
    box,
And the verdict of your eyes when you look up at me.