Kurt, last night Dwight Evans put it all
together, the way you made collage,
with an exemplary catch followed
by an assist at first base, a hit
in the seventh inning for the tie,
and another in the last of the
ninth to pull it out at Fenway Park
and win the game. The madness method
of “Baseball” gathers bits and pieces
of ordinary things—like bleacher
ticket stubs, used Astroturf, Fenway
Frank wrappers, yearbooks, and memory—
to paste them onto the bonkers grid
of the page. I stood at the workbench
after school and all day on weekends
—and I stand there still, in the gloomy
cellar on Ardmore Street, cutting and
gluing, my tongue protruding from my
lips, and nothing flies. When my daughter—
bored at thirteen by the grown-up talk
at the fancy picnic outside the
theater in Stratford, Ontario—
remarked frequently on the paddle-
boats skimming the lake (“Oh, look!” “That looks
like fun!” “I wonder where they start from.”),
I understood: I said, “Let’s go find
the dock or whatever and rent one.”
Her face livened up, but she was smart:
As we walked toward the pier together,
she asked: "Are you certain you want to
do this, or are you doing it just
to be mean?” In nineteen thirty-eight,
the hurricane lifted Aunt Clara’s
cottage at Silver Sands and carried
it twenty yards to deposit it
in a salt meadow; the tidal wave
overwhelmed the Thimble Island where
Uncle Arthur lived. When rain started
in the second inning at Fenway
Park, it drizzled on umbrellas raised
in boxes by the field. Most of us
climbed to remote seats back under the
overhang to watch the (I wrote this
before, back in the second inning)
puddles pocked by raindrops. In the lights
we made out straight up-and-down falling
pencil lines of rain that the pitchers
squinted through to see the catchers’ signs;
batters peered to watch how the ball spun.
After six innings it rained harder
and the umpire suspended play—game
tied three to three—then called it an hour
later. We struggled wetly out from
a game without issue. The young men
partied and slept, to make tomorrow’s
doubleheader at five. All night I
slept and woke practicing—obsessive
even in sleep, just as I bully
notes into lines—how the slow rain fell
like time measured in vertical light.
When I was a child, Connecticut
of the thirties and forties, we drove
to Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds,
a couple of hours down the newly
constructed or incomplete parkways
to Brooklyn especially, dense with
its tiny park and passionate crowd.
After Billy Herman brilliantly
stopped a ground ball and flipped to Pee Wee
for the force, I turned immediate
attention to a vendor and my
father thought I missed the lucky play.
While that was happening, Kurt, I guess
you left Germany for Norway. Good.
As I thought about Curt (sic) Davis,
you were building a Merz-apartment.
I watched the first game of the nineteen
forty-one World Series in the Bronx,
when Joe Gordon took Curt Davis deep
and we lost three to two, unable
to rally back. Then the long drive home.