Before lights, Kurt, baseball games were sometimes delayed
on account of darkness. Usually, as I
remember, they were continued and concluded
before another game began. On occasion,
now, games are suspended because of a curfew.
Really, who can finish a series like this one?
Therefore I declare that this Merzball game will stop
after twelve innings of play—although, as Nolan
Ryan puts it, pitching for Advil, “Ah could pitch
another nine innings." In nineteen fifty-five,
the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the World Series
for the first time, as Johnny Podres won three games.
I watched with my father on a seven-inch screen,
borrowed from a neighbor’s attic, in the guest room
where he coughed toward his death on a hospital bed.
He was happy—we were happy—minutes on end,
despite the losses of voice, eyesight, and hearing.
Winning distracted us; we looked for distraction.
Kurt, did you ever observe Dr. Naismith’s game?
Basketball is the performance of miracles—
levitation, luck, opposites turning into
each other, primary-process as sports event—
while baseball remains the alternative to days:
twilight on the porch, lemonade, and sleepiness.
Dock Ellis performed pointguard for his high school team
but pitched for a profession. He threw a no-no
for Pittsburgh against San Diego—on acid,
having forgotten that he was supposed to pitch
until almost too late. Years later Gene Clines told
the story of Dock’s change-up that a prospect swung
through so humiliatingly he was finished—
sent back to triple-A, never heard from again.
In-your-face is more common in basketball, where
wonders and stunts are ordinary, good-natured,
and devastating. When we fake this way, fake that,
break past the body leaping midair to block us,
and lay it up behind his back, we are deathless.
Among enormous bodies, alert eyes, and hands
that flap like manta rays, dandy delicate guards
are minnows outwitting whales, or sons their fathers,
and basketball is Austrian psychodrama—
expressionist in its distortion of physics,
grand-operatic in its bipolarity—
while baseball is De Stijl: orderly, obsessive,
the meeting ground of arithmetic and beauty
or the daily grid of manic pastoral song.
In September the Red Sox have an outside chance
if Toronto keeps on clutching, if the Tigers
lose games they ought to lose. Today as the leaves fall
red and amber, our town’s yellow schoolbus returns
up the gravel road in a mild September rain
for the waiting child who wears her yellow slicker
and carries last year’s beat-up Big Bird lunchbox, first
day of school. Chill nights at Fenway bring April back
with annual ironies of remembered dreams
and retrospective foresight—as gardens go down
behind the house, under the hill. Here Jennifer
last spring raised a wild dazzlement of daffodils,
and under the high sun of July prodigious
peonies of privacy, whiter than winter;
where buttercups flourished by a stony wellhead,
now dry stalks wither. Hurricane Bob shut Fenway
two days in a row, pity, with Cleveland in town.
On Jennifer’s neck it is impossible to
detect the scars of her cancer: virgin again.
K.C. monitors a possible recurrence
by checking the level of his blood’s CEA
each quarter, raising anxiety to lose it
for three months more of Jennifer’s shorts, poetry,
and baseball. My father is thirty-five years dead,
buried on Christmas Eve. For twenty years his death
provoked the choices of my life. I use mornings
to work in, and afternoons for reading and love,
and do desultory chores nights during baseball—
paying bills, dictating letters. When the Red Sox
play on the West Coast, K.C. takes an evening nap,
eight-thirty to ten-thirty, then watches the game
until one A.M. Five drugs together control
Jennifer’s depression: She can’t sleep or hold still
or watch baseball but her mood is enterprising;
joyously she writes poems that render despair
and gardens until dark encloses the garden.
She weeps to recall Jack, who turned into ashes,
remembered by a granite bench with flowering shrubs.
It is the season for blackberries that prosper
at roadside in thorny tangles and in the trench
of the abandoned railroad. Mrs. Roberts walks
from early spring to late fall by the asphalt’s edge,
toting a Shaker basket for wild strawberries
and volunteer asparagus, for dandelion
greens in spring, for blackberries from August into
hard frost. David inquires: What does K.C. stand for
(besides the vainglorious Irishman Casey
mocked by the millowner’s Harvardman son and heir)?
Prizes for best answers: Kurt Carcinoma? Kid
Chumpleheart? Kitsch Champion? Kitchen Cat? Kup Cake?
Steve Blass was a control pitcher one year, the next
season—after his friend Roberto Clemente’s
plane crashed in a winter sea—couldn’t throw a strike.
John Singer Sargent defined A portrait as "that
form of painting in which there is always ‘something
a little wrong about the mouth.’" When I was young,
I covered my mouth when I felt a difficult
subject approach—or when I lied; with age I stopped
lying. Kurt, while you built your Merz-house, the Dodgers
played the game of baseball with Red Barber’s guidance,
who still talks baseball for NPR on Fridays
from Tallahassee. His voice was soft and nervous,
his affection luminous. Baseball is better
than model airplanes, and poems are better still—
preferable to conceited demonstrations
that poems cannot exist and authors are dead.
Blass lost his control because he was terrified
of hitting batters—after his friend’s plane went down.
He said he felt like Secretariat: all that
money and he couldn’t get it up. Next year Blass
sold class rings to Connecticut high school seniors.
The farmhouse where we live straggles back to Ragged
Mountain from an ox path that became the Grafton
Turnpike in 1803, later Route 4. The cape,
in its almost two hundred years of adjustment
and generation, wandered from yellow to red
to white and green on the same squared-off oaken sills.
Our unpainted barn remains upright. Beside it
my grandfather and I threw baseballs back and forth
in nineteen forty-two while firebombs descended
on England, Spitfires shot down Messerschmitts, and you
coughed beginning slow death. In September maples
turn yellow and red against the black-brown rusty
barnboards; now Jennifer’s sunflowers feed the autumn
chickadees, nuthatches, and slate-colored juncos;
soon grosbeaks with yellow chests will peck at the seeds.
In September the Red Sox lose games in the ninth.
The season ends. Even if you win the Series,
the season ends, O, and games dwindle to Florida’s
Instructional League where outfielders without wheels
learn to be catchers. From Florida north will truck
oranges that Jennifer squeezes in the cold
light of a low sun. I wear my yellow sweater;
we eat scrambled eggs from blue and white dishes; her
hair’s kerchief is yellow. We gather yellow days
inning by inning with care to appear careless,
thinking again how Carlton Fisk ended Game Six
in the twelfth inning with a poke over the wall.