I would like to explain baseball to
Kurt Schwitters, Merz-poet and artist,
whose work was clothing, office, bedroom,
and carapace, who glued together
assemblages of ordinary things—cigarette wrappers, bus tickets,
ads—first to make collage, and then to
inhabit. I would like to linger
with Schwitters in the Fenway bleachers,
explaining baseball. But, as poets
tell us, the man is dead, and I—call
me K.C.—lack his German, much less
death’s German. Well, there are nine players
on a baseball team, so to speak, and
there are nine innings, with trivial
exceptions like extra-inning games
and games shortened by rain or darkness,
by riot, hurricane, earthquake, or
the Second Law of Thermodynam
ics. Rilke feared the death of the sun;
then we exploded the sun. The Merz-
collagist expired in England, of
emphysema originally
contracted during poverty and
inflation, when he smoked the deutschemark.
Rilke died of leukemia, his
blood clarified to spiritual
water. When Jennifer walks down the
driveway, absently posting letters
in the mailbox or strolling across
the road to water the chickens, I
lean after her narrow waist—the swell
undulant above it, below it
the smooth slender outcurving outswoop—
the way July’s daylily buds tip
south from Ragged’s green hill, following
the risen sun, and swell to erupt
orange. Tonight, after baseball, she
looks Chinese, skin under her eyes puffed
from her morning tears. As she totters,
she touches bookcase and tabletop
with the tips of dubious fingers.
Depression is the blood’s own journey,
by its own map. There is only one
thing to do; happily we do it.
From home plate to the pitcher’s rubber,
as the actress said to the bishop,
takes sixty feet and six inches. Of
course you will recognize Being: It
looks just like Nothingness except that
it wears a striped Thai-silk four-in-hand.
As the poet says, “Words cannot tell,
cannot express . . . Words falter . . . Words are
inadequate to describe . . .” Poets
woo the unspeakable to their desks,
listening to radio baseball.
Meantime the cells or constituent
molecules go on sunning themselves
in the pure daylight of unconscious
punning and dancing, now slowing down,
now jetting Cambridge blue electrons—
the enterprise of ongoingness.
This condition resembles baseball
in its laboratory method
or purity, physics of nine times
nine times nine times nine. We hanged three deer
behind the new 7-Eleven
beside lions Flaubert crucified.
I am not interested in words
without sentences, or sentences
without meaning. Every meaningless
sentence says the same thing. Igitur,
they pave the green mountain for progress
while they grow hairy vert chemicals
into grass cement for the diamond
and Newfound Lake newly obscured by
sawtooth-shingled condominia
at x thousand thousand dollars each
to prohibit view of the wind’s lake.
Kurt, when the pitcher makes a false start,
the runners move up: It is a balk.