This piece is quite different from most baseball poetry that I’ve seen. I love how it is broken up into nine stanzas, as if they were innings. And there’s a kind of surrealism to the piece. In some ways, it makes me think of the paintings of Salvador Dalí. This poem was originally published in The Museum of Clear Ideas in 1993.
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1. Baseball, I warrant, is not the whole occupation of the aging boy. Far from it: There are cats and roses; there is her water body. She fills the skin of her legs up, like water; under her blouse, water assembles, swelling lukewarm; her mouth is water, her cheekbones cool water; water flows in her rapid hair. I drink water 2. from her body as she walks past me to open a screen door, as she bends to weed among herbs, or as she lies beside me at five in the morning in submarine light. Curt Davis threw a submarine ball, terrifying to right-handed batters. Another pleasure, thoroughly underrated, is micturition, which is even 3. commoner than baseball. It begins by announcing itself more slowly and less urgently than sexual desire, but (confusingly) in the identical place. Ignorant men therefore on occasion confuse beer- drinking with love; but I have discussed adultery elsewhere. We allow this sweet release to commence itself, 4. addressing a urinal perhaps, perhaps poised over a white toilet with feet spread wide and head tilted back: oh, what’delicious permission! what luxury of letting go! what luxe yellow curve of mildest ecstasy! Granted we may not compare it to poignant and crimson bliss, it is as voluptuous as rain all night long 5. after baseball in August’s parch. The jade plant’s trunk, as thick as a man’s wrist, urges upward thrusting from packed dirt, with Chinese vigor spreading limbs out that bear heavy leaves—palpable, dark, juicy, green, profound: They suck, the way bleacher fans claim inhabitants of box seats do. The Fourth of July we exhaust stars from sparklers in the late 6. twilight. We swoop ovals of white-gold flame, making quick signatures against an imploding dark. The five-year-old girl kisses the young dog goodbye and chases the quick erratic kitten. When she returns in a few years as a tall shy girl, she will come back to a dignified spreading cat and a dog ash-gray on the muzzle. Sparklers 7. expel quickly this night of farewell: If they didn’t burn out, they wouldn’t be beautiful. Kurt, may I hazard an opinion on expansion? Last winter meetings, the major leagues (al- ready meager in ability, scanty in starting pitchers) voted to add two teams. Therefore minor league players will advance all too quickly, 8. with boys in the bigs who wouldn’t have made double-A forty years ago. Directors of player personnel will search like poets scrambling in old notebooks for unused leftover lines, but when was the last time anyone cut back when he or she could expand? Kurt, I get the notion that you were another who never discarded 9. anything, a keeper from way back. You smoked cigarettes, in inflation- times rolled from chopped-up banknotes, billions inhaled and exhaled as cancerous smoke. When commerce woke, Men was awake. If you smoked a cigar, the cigar band discovered itself glued into collage. Ongoing life became the material of Kurtschwittersball.
