Vol. 1, No. 2: Line Drives & Bloop Hits

The lilacs left me that year
and none of it mattered.

I’d get high before breakfast
and drink in the afternoons.

Jake moved to Pittsburgh
and would drive on weekends

to watch Cleveland baseball
from the bleachers with me. 

We drank overpriced beer
and screamed the names

of players the teams had
traded or cut. It was only funny 

because neither of us were bitter. 
Teams paid players to be

replaceable, to pack their lives
into suitcases and trade states.

We watched, game after game,
collecting new names to shout

into the diamond. And in
the parking lot, after Jake had 

started his long drive home,
I shout your name 

at empty cars. One lights up,
drives off into the night. 

Love turns accident into gold
over time, with the kind
of concentrated responsiveness of
a physical therapist or a baseball
coach—does that hurt, hold the bat
here, like this—and there’s no
substitute for this tender
guidance, no way to go to sleep
and wake to a solved world
from the back of the book; when
you turn there, you’ll find
a long index of first lines, like
a batting order your broken foot
let you dodge to study alchemy.

You can tell me
it’s the same
as moving a chair

from one corner
of my mind to another,
but I only know

how to peg a fastball
on the inside black
while I’m looking

for a pitch away.
My hands hold a flood
for the weak spot

in the riverbank.
It doesn’t matter
that I don’t hit it flush,

I round first
without a catch
in my knees.

The water is smooth
in my quick-twitch
dreams. 

I wait months for it
to roll me bare
into the crop

of my youth. I am
still the bloom when
I describe the bloom.

Strange, the flare of envy
to watch them play, old
enough to be their mother,
though the outcropping
of parents clustered along
the sagging chainlink
knows I am not one of them,
though one might think it
want, the small part of me that fills
in this and other obligatory desires.
The boys’ shirts, emblazoned
with the local tire shop
in place of their names, almost neon
in the glare of the tall lights,
bunch and balloon at their waists,
small wrists bending under
the weight of gloves, their little hands,
small shoes, overly-Velcroed
hats. Their catalogue of smallness.
How exhausting those gloves must be.
The tree frogs swell and bats chirp
their metal joy through the air.
The parents swap secrets,
how often they’ve fished
out gum and seeds, little twists
of tape from pockets, saved things.
They are wiser than I’ll ever be.
This team, these friends enshrined
in the carwash lobby, over the deli counter—
how much the world will take from them.
Another ball lops off into the night,
clouds of mosquitos moth-thick,
and another round of ribbing peppers
pitcher, then batter, then volunteer ump.
Back in the dark house the same game,
announcers’ low voices, silences warm
and alive with the ballpark’s background,
and I am standing here, stranger to these
mothers and fathers and boys, watching
another endless game join the endless
families and coaches, dogs both rowdy
and old, all the patient siblings
more interested in the dirt, whatever’s on
the screen, benevolent, beatific gift of glow
bracelets. I’ve watched it all from here outside
the fence; farther back among the irises, heavy
hydrangeas like ghosts in the dusk; farther still,
the porch threshold, ducking
wildly around the wren house
as it comes upon me in the dark.
I’ve watched it all, known them all
in this faraway way, loved them even
for their littleness and all their lives hold.
Once I thought my life could hold so much.
How can it be that I’m still standing here?

In a nation of water
drawing on edges
the outfielder stands—artist

touching up his piece, latest
young man to deign east
his private gift, unto death.

Difficulties everywhere
he mixes media:
charcoal, watercolor, new

events on paper, guided
but bleeding beyond
his strokes—graded wash, windblown

fly, runner picked off, cutoff
misaligned, stumped streak:
imprecise events, arrayed 

before him, every agent
free—there is the rub
of mixed media unbound, 

sombré, cardinal to crimson 
and back, unresolved.
Curt Flood knows this is his piece—

the soft drafts in Denmark—
shaping at remove
his undiscovered country, 

moving, becoming himself
the movement, the tracked 
fly, the cutoff man turning. 

Water like despair holding
with its promises
its danger, he follows through.

The pitcher returns to the mound
after Tommy John surgery. I mean

immediately after—he’s out there 
arm-in-a-brace gritting his teeth

in an empty park on that hill
of dirt that has defined his life

since Little League. The doctors 
chased him into the parking lot,

his teammates and manager begged
in a flurry of all-caps texts

but he drove GPS-silenced
to the stadium after midnight,

finding his way by starlight
the way indigo buntings do

to get to Poughkeepsie 
or wherever after a winter

in the tropics, maps stitched
on their hearts, no hurricane

or skyscraper shall stop them
spring after spring, damn it all—

They don’t sing for you!
They sing for themselves!

We heard it
pull us under
the silent earth—
collapsing the stadium
in bricks and steel
as if it were
the parachute 
we ran beneath
clapping our
phone numbers
in unison
before fleeing
the resounding
applause. 

Eighth grade, final game of the season
and I’m starting on the mound.

Little time passes
before the shellacking begins: I’m giving up

double digit runs, so much so the yips appear
and now I can’t find the plate.

The other team smirks as I walk the full side
but still Coach won’t relieve me.

I step off the rubber. Cry to the bench,
“Please. Take me out.”

*

After the game, my brother, who had never hit me,
did not hit me.

Captain of the high school team,
All-Division starting pitcher,

kept track of his strikeouts with pen-marked Ks
on the inside brim of his cap.

(For every hit batter,
a tiny R.I.P. tombstone).

We ride in silence from ballfield to driveway.
His no-words worse than any punch or body slam.

Up the hill, and then, the car powered down,
before I’ve opened the door to flee, he says,

“Don’t ever do that.
Don’t ever ask to be taken out of a game.”

*

Good advice.
Even through the terrible times –

The breakups, the layoffs, the booze, and pills –
I somehow kept it close.

When grief and regret were my sun and moon,
and loneliness felt like a life sentence.

When I couldn’t be bothered to shower or shave.
When I couldn’t leave the house.

(True story: I stood at the lip of a bridge).
(Epilogue: I stepped back).

Fifteen games out by June and still
I insist on watching every inning
as if to prove devotion outlives discretion.

Do us both the favor and turn
the volume off, you say though I pretend
not to listen. Outside on Georgia Avenue,

street wet enough I can hear the reflections
through the wall, comes the sound of a car
passing—only the car never passes.

Never slows, never stops. Leaves only the sound
of going and going without receding.
How I have hung in your life, uneasy

in that strangest way: familiar. How our pitcher
on the TV, crested with the salt of defeat,
describes pretty much the worst curveball

I ever threw: knew it was out of here before
it ever left my hand. He looks to go on, but doesn’t
say it—how could he, in front of all

these people, even just the one. I watch
him wiping his brow, as he resolves,
next time, to hold on the whole way home.

Instead of hand and glove 
and jockstrap and thigh, the animal 
meld of body to uniform, 
in Garfield Park, there is a mother, 
wearing frayed jeans and Converse, 
trying to teach her pre-teen son 
how to throw a baseball, to plant his back foot 
and crane his hand like a cobra’s head, 
using the momentum of his hips
to push the ball toward its target 
like a bullet meeting the crosshairs 
of a scope. 
                  She is the stand-in for a man 
off forming barbed constellations 
on a daydreamed map of the California coast, 
his body now accustomed to only 
furtive forms of tenderness, and after 
all the other families have headed home, 
she takes the boy and their single mitt
to an unpolluted part of town, recalling 
what little she has learned from watching, 
that the spin will follow the seams of the ball, 
and this could help him make new friends, 
a pastime that keeps kids busy at night 
and will remind him of something
that lives in his belly, his father 
dragging himself from the third base bleachers, 
slipping his fingers through the dugout fence, 
angry that his son won’t say hello. 
 

The feel of a hand just below
my wrist

Slowly turning the world

Buzz of hospital lights like radio static, like
my grandfather listening as

the Pirates go into extra innings in
his middle age

His body shaped like mine

Center of the empty garage

Split-level house
on the edge of the Pines

When you faint your spirit halves like
a creek diverging in two

You abandon the turning inside
yourself

I’ve taken a pitch to the face and I know
what it’s like to be forgotten

Does God really remember what man cannot

When I came to the Heartland I abandoned
Two parts of myself

The first was my love for the game and the second
is something I cannot tell you

I’ve always swung from tiny town: a grain silo
standing just beyond centerfield, oftentimes rained out
because we didn’t have money for a tarp, a cattle panel
hung high over a short right field, pickup trucks backed
up against left, charcoal smoke blowing and all their
radios gracing the field with a chorus of Cardinals
baseball. We lost almost all the times we played, often
by the grace of the ten-run mercy rule. Of us, two boys
could pitch, and I kept close by at second base, a
once-broken-collarbone growing into a squirt-gun-arm
so that they couldn’t keep me far from where all the
losing was. Away games were tough, it being real hard to
drive three hours knowing a loss in four innings was
waiting there. One of the last games I played, I wound up
on a mound in Missouri, pitching because it was too early
for the mercy rule to apply, and we were down already by
eighteen runs. I threw sixteen straight balls only because
somebody had to do it. Now some nights behind the
checkout counter, I look around and listen, still waiting for
that umpire to emerge from the backroom and grant me a
strike a decade too late, or better yet, pull off his face
mask and call the whole game off on account of mercy.