Sometime, Kurt, you ought to come along
to Danbury Elementary
School when I umpire a softball game.
I call balls and strikes, safe and out, foul
and fair. When I blow a call, I make
it up on the next one. Once when I
intoned “Strike one!” a small batter said,
"Hey, that’s your ‘Casey at the Bat’ voice,
Mr. Hall.” (I dislike it, having
a poetry voice—but I have one.)
Danbury goes through the sixth grade, and
the best game of the year is the last,
when the sixth grade plays the P.T.O.
reinforced by teachers. Serious
athleticism and revenge combine
to dissipate in the ethical
disorder of prejudiced calls by
an undisinterested umpire.
Before we left Spring Glen Grammar School
for high school, the eighth grade played hardball.
I tried out for catcher, knowing that,
aside from a good first-string player,
nobody wanted to wear the mask.
They cut me anyway, and I slunk
off to my familiar province of
tears, failure, and humiliation
where I lived until Harvard College.
Sometimes I take naps as shallow as
puddles on cracked sidewalks in Spring Glen
after a summer shower when sun
will lift the dampness soon and restore
dryness to white cement. And sometimes
I nap the rare nap as profound as
the Pacific Ocean, where fathoms
of fault steam from a crack in the deep
floor: Napoleon! Napoleon!
After fifty years of images
and symbols (watch out, kids; here comes a
symbol), it is difficult to keep
oneself head-bent-down to the language
only, as if language were a grid
for athletes, Kurt, as in parts of speech.
If a coincidence of noises
suggests the possibility of
interjecting a French emperor
onto a suburb confounded with
an ocean composed of shifting plates
and geological moral terms
multiplied by alliteration,
what have we gained except, perhaps, the
grid’s distracted polymorphous joy
in evasion? I insinuate
notions despite my resolution,
of many years, to remain aloof
from disputes over the usefulness
of this method of generation
or that. I know from experience
that the matter of least import is
what you think you are doing. Still, I
exercise control by not making
public, by crossing out, perhaps to
some degree by concealing myself—
but mostly by keeping my silence.
Thus K.C. becomes Napoleon,
Nap Lajoie’s first name. In the Book of
Dead Cats, dishes of Nine Lives Super
Supper petrify. A permanent
odor of tomcat establishes
ownership in the next world of twelve
volumes of the OED, snapshots
breathe three times a year, and the armchair’s
clawmarks reify practices of
rodent control listed in the Book
of Dead Mice. Soft columns of tanned skin
descend from her pink shorts this morning:
Jennifer’s. I stare happily at
linen that covers her slender hips,
at her thighs and knees. What good fortune
to touch Jennifer’s limbs—delicate,
supple, smooth, and skinny as a deer’s—
that twist with a grown woman’s passion.