Baseball

for John Limon The game of baseball is not a metaphor and I know it’s not really life. The chalky green diamond, the lovely dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes multiplying around the cities are only neat playing fields. Their structure is not the frame of history carved out of forest, that is not what I see on my ascent. And down in the stadium, the veteran catcher guiding the young pitcher through the innings, the line of concentration between them, that delicate filament is not like the way you are helping me, only it reminds me when I strain for analogies, the way a rookie strains for perfection, and the veteran, in his wisdom, seems to promise it, it glows from his upheld glove, and the man in front of me in the grandstand, drinking banana daiquiris from a thermos, continuing through a whole dinner to the aromatic cigar even as our team is shut out, nearly hitless, he is not like the farmer that Auden speaks of in Breughel’s Icarus, or the four inevitable woman-hating drunkards, yelling, hugging each other and moving up and down continuously for more beer and the young wife trying to understand what a full count could be to please her husband happy in his old dreams, or the little boy in the Yankees cap already nodding off to sleep against his father, program and popcorn memories sliding into the future, and the old woman from Lincoln, Maine, screaming at the Yankee slugger with wounded knees to break his leg this is not a microcosm, not even a slice of life and the terrible slumps, when the greatest hitter mysteriously goes hitless for weeks, or the pitcher’s stuff is all junk who threw like a magician all last month, or the days when our guys look like Sennett cops, slipping, bumping each other, then suddenly, the play that wasn’t humanly possible, the Kid we know isn’t ready for the big leagues, leaps into the air to catch a ball that should have gone downtown, and coming off the field is hugged and bottom-slapped by the sudden sorcerers, the winning team the question of what makes a man slump when his form, his eye, his power aren’t to blame, this isn’t like the bad luck that hounds us, and his frustration in the games not like our deep rage for disappointing ourselves the ball park is an artifact, manicured, safe, “scene in an Easter egg”, and the order of the ball game, the firm structure with the mystery of accidents always contained, not the wild field we wander in, where I’m trying to recite the rules, to repeat the statistics of the game, and the wind keeps carrying my words away