Baseball & Poetry
In honor of the new beginning of the baseball season and the 22+ inning game the other night between the Fathers and the Mountains, here is a portion of B.H. Fairchild's poem "The Blue Buick: A Narrative" from his book Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest:
"...a ball diamond, he would say,
is the most aesthetically pure form ever given
to a playing field, and as a student of geometry
I could understand that, the way the diamond fits
inside a circle enclosed within a larger one
extending from the arc along the outfield wall.
And the way the game itself falls into curves:
runners rounding base paths; the arc of the long ball's
sudden rise and floating, slow descent, sometimes
into the outer darkness beyond the left-field wall;
the shape a double play can take when the shortstop
snags the ball on his far right and the second baseman
makes a fluid pivot so the ball seems to glide
in an unbroken line around to first; and of course
a killer curve or good knuckle ball by someone like
Preacher Roe or Whitey Ford whose looping arc
briefly mesmerizes the batter it deceives;
all a game of curves and arcs, though Maria
said it was a game of tension, a gathering,
then release, a kind of sexual tension, the way
the pitcher coiled, then unwound, and of course
the explosive letting go, and she said it in a way
that made me stop and think awhile. In a plane once
I saw a diamond far below all lit up;
an emerald resting on the breast of darkness, and now
I recall Maria and the curve from her neck along
the jawline to her raised chin as she followed
the arc of the ball in flight and the way her eyes
gave back the flare of the outfield lights at night..."
