Saul Bellow

Nobody cruising to thirty home runs,

a hundred RBIs, is thinking,

‘I hope my creative writing professor

likes my poem about writing poems.’

Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog’s ‘fuckyknuckles’

were the excuse for why he, man enough,

still wasn’t cut for baseball. Fair enough.

Nobody leaves baseball for literature.

Delmore Schwartz, the real Von Humboldt Fleisher

in Saul Bellow’s roman à clef Humboldt’s Gift,

despairingly wondered why poetry

couldn’t excite him the way the Giants did.

It hurts he couldn’t consider how the Giants

were having a better season than poetry,

and one day MFA programs would admit

all the fuckyknucklers they could handle.