For all the marbles

Ensign Pulver

shoots Captain Morton in the bottom  

with a ball of foil studded with tacks fired

from a slingshot.   Why no longer matters.

A dictionary makes a cameo as a prop

so Robert Walker Jr. can deliver

the line “I shot him in the bue-tocks.”,

to Walter Matthau, kindling

my lifelong love affair with Daniel Webster. 

Even at eight I could appreciate

a destroyer named the USS Reluctant,

young enough to grow heady

over the word ass-sassin, yet blind

to navy nurses in clingy khaki uniforms.  

The memory of Captain Morton’s appendectomy

at the hands of Ensign Pulver

under frog juice anesthesia

remains with me to this day,

persisting like the handful

of marbles Pulver sews

into the heartless captain. 

Dictionaries bided their time

while I watched Burl Ives

worry his ample belly, puzzling

over the castanet clacking

at the end of the film, words like subversion  

and memento mori shimmering

like corvettes on my horizon.