Baseball’s Back
Baseball’s back
It’s crackling on a radio
Sitting by a canning jar filled with fireflies
A barefoot summer, always afternoon in voluptuous-full July.
The screen door slams and flies scatter
A stick and ball routine with umpteen possibilities
Written in the DNA of the Americas
Understood by us before birth.
The ball hit to strike one, to be caught by the short stop for an out
“You dirty chump!”
Or to ball four, and a base is taken, another stolen
The ball up and over the wall for the home run announced by a bugle and a tom-tom pounding in the back bleachers
The ball soars on and on___ across the Atlantic. And doesn’t come down until it reaches Hemingway’s Cuba,
where boys with gloves and bats chase, to catch it
in the front yard of the Finca Vigia
Another ball tossed to be caught
An organ is playing in the background
And the ball is dropped by the second baseman
To be argued by a skipper kicking dirt at the umpire
Who sends him to the dug out
Where he rings up a call
to the mound
to demand the ball from a tobacco-chewing pitcher
Who shame-facedly hands it over
before he slinks down to the dug out
Backwards in time, a game of our fathers and our fathers before them
It carried us through two world wars and the depression
In our father’s fields, in newly-scythed meadows
In the Elysian fields of Hoboken, New Jersey,
In bleachers so close to the mound you could reach out and touch the umpire
In state-of-the-arc parks bursting in fireworks and scoreboards with digital imaging
Yet and still, there’s the naked silence between “he deals and … ”
“Down in the front, beer man.”
The groans, the hutzpahs, hands in the air- hurrahs
Ahh-hh, yet and again, and finally, baseball’s back
_____
Susan Dale’s poems and fiction are on WestWard Quarterly, Ken *Again, Penman Review, Inner Art Journal, Garbanzo, and Linden Avenue. In 2007, she won the grand prize for poetry from Oneswan. She has two published chapbooks on the internet: Spaces Among Spaces by languageandculture.org and Bending the Spaces of Time by Barometric Pressure.
*
The 1958 New York Yankees sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” on the Ed Sullivan Show
