Kurt, terror is merely the thesis:
Ten years later the guerrilla chief
swears himself in as President for
Life, appointing Commando Plastique
his Minister for Health and Welfare.
Meanwhile former Emperor Pluto
wags his tail at the Zurich Hilton,
attended by his Secretary,
Miss Universe-und-Swiss-Bankaccount.
However, Kurt, we must inform you
with regret (you will not be surprised)
that The Committee of Reconcil-
iation finds itself unable
to attend the ceremonies, nor
will it observe the Riviera
reunion of the secret police:
The peacemakers have been moldering
in their mass grave for a decade. I
cherish the photograph on my wall,
Kurt, where you embrace Bambino Babe
Ruth (Tokyo, nineteen twenty-eight).
Photography’s dolor is common:
We are forever older than our
photographs. Even a Polaroid—
by the time the fish of the image
has swum to the surface and settled
into its fins and fortunes for all
eternity—measures another
sixty seconds fading toward the grave.
Baseball, like sexual intercourse
and art, stops short, for a moment, the
indecent continuous motion
of time forward, implying our death
and imminent decomposition.
Did you ever marry the bottle?
I married Scotch when I was forty.
For two years we kept house together.
She constructed pale renewable
joy when twilight was summer; she was
impassive, agreeable, faithful,
forgiving; she was church and castle,
princess and dragon, Eden and Elm
Street, hell and heaven poured together.
If it were not God’s will, the baseball
would disintegrate when the pitcher
touched it. Grace before dinner implores
food to remain among visible
things: Only His will sustains peapods.
Flying over China we saw base-
ball diamonds in the sun. Guangzhou and
Shenyang, the smallest of our cities,
each kept four million people. We pale
anomalous tall phantoms with big
noses walked at night in the glow from
small shops among the polloi that roiled
multitudinousness everywhere.
In Chengdu at night the scroll sellers
played flashlights over their wares—bamboo,
dragons, snapdragons—that hung from ropes
strung between poplars. In the full moon
the fox walks on snow, black prints of fox;
but the chicken’s head has migrated
to the pigsty already. Oink. Oink.
Baseball in the winter is our dream’s
retrospective summer, and even
(D. V.) the summer of prospect, game
perfectly mental that we control
by the addition of our wishful
selves throwing, catching, hitting, running
bases, staring with the same eyes back
and forth as pitcher and as batter.
No game plays its theater so nightly:
It never rains on this Wrigley Field;
in this Tiger Stadium it is
always Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds,
Forbes Field, Griffith Stadium, Braves Field,
and Comiskey Park. Whatever’s green,
it’s not grass; those aren’t hot dogs either;
but when we depart the old within-
Fenway of January and snow,
we find ticket stubs in our wallets.