Baseball Days, '61

All summer the patio drifted in and out of light the color of margarine; days were blue, not always sky blue. At night the word Algeria circulated among the grown-ups. A patient of my father had whooping cough, the words drifted into summer blue. The evenings spun into stadium lights. Kennedy’s hair blew across the screen. Castro was just a sofa. I saw James Meredith’s face through a spread of leaves on the evening news. The fridge sweat with orangeade, the trees whooped some nights in rain— a kid down the street kept coughing into his mitt. Static sounds from Comiskey and Fenway came though the vinyl, the plastic, the pillow— So when it left Stallard’s hand, when Roger Maris’s arms whipped the bat and the bullet-arc carried into the chasm the disaffections at 344 ft. near the bullpen fence under the green girder holding up the voices rising into the façade and over the river where a Baptist choir on Lenox Ave. was sending up a variation of Sweet Chariot into the traffic on the FDR that was jammed at the Triboro where a derrick was broken and the cables of its arms picked up the star-blast of voices coming over the Stadium façade spilling down the black next-game sign into the vector of a tilted Coke bottle on a billboard at the edge of the river where a cloud of pigeons rose over Roosevelt Island. It was evening by the time the cars unjammed and the green of the outfield unfroze and the white arc had faded into skyline before fall came full of boys throwing themselves onto the turf with inexplicable desire for the thing promised. The going. Then gone.