{"id":5731,"date":"2013-04-16T11:02:54","date_gmt":"2013-04-16T15:02:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/beginnersheart\/?p=5731"},"modified":"2013-04-16T11:02:54","modified_gmt":"2013-04-16T15:02:54","slug":"day-16-of-national-poetry-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/2013\/04\/day-16-of-national-poetry-month.html","title":{"rendered":"day #16 of National Poetry Month ~"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>As we enter the baseball season (for real addicts, that began with the spring training season!), I thought I’d share one of my very favourite poems.<\/p>\n

While baseball isn’t a great love of mine, I do have fond memories of watching my sons play. Beginning with T-ball, both sons played for a few years, then went on to other interests. But for a short time, I remember sitting in the stands, at both their games and the city’s team. Reading, letting them run around under the bleachers eating baseball food.<\/p>\n

Something about baseball feels very American to me — more so than any other sport, although I actually prefer watching basketball. But baseball is so very human. It needs patience, teamwork, the occasional vivid out-of-the-park moment and dark loss. All held in the soft palm of a leather glove.<\/p>\n

Since I’m certain anyone reading a Buddhist\/Unitarian blog can make his or her own connections, I won’t go into all the ways poetry, baseball, and Pete Fairchild’s poem are metaphors for the human condition. \ud83d\ude42 It’s a long poem but so worth it.<\/p>\n

Here’s B.H. Fairchild’s ‘Body and Soul’:<\/p>\n

Body and Soul<\/strong><\/p>\n

Half-numb, guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs,
\nour fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzling
\nthe facts but mauling the truth, and my friend’s father begins
\nto lay out with the slow ease of a blues ballad a story
\nabout sandlot baseball in Commerce, Oklahoma decades ago.
\nThese were men’s teams, grown men, some in their thirties
\nand forties who worked together in zinc mines or on oil rigs,
\nsweat and khaki and long beers after work, steel guitar music
\nwhanging in their ears, little white rent houses to return to
\nwhere their wives complained about money and broken Kenmores
\nand then said the hell with it and sang Body and Soul
\nin the bathtub and later that evening with the kids asleep
\nlay in bed stroking their husband’s wrist tattoo and smoking
\nChesterfields from a fresh pack until everything was O.K.
\nWell, you get the idea. Life goes on, the next day is Sunday,
\nanother ball game, and the other team shows up one man short.<\/p>\n

They say, we’re one man short, but can we use this boy,
\nhe’s only fifteen years old, and at least he’ll make a game.
\nThey take a look at the kid, muscular and kind of knowing
\nthe way he holds his glove, with the shoulders loose,
\nthe thick neck, but then with that boy’s face under
\na clump of angelic blonde hair, and say, oh, hell, sure,
\nlet’s play ball. So it all begins, the men loosening up,
\njoking about the fat catcher’s sex life, it’s so bad
\nlast night he had to hump his wife, that sort of thing,
\npairing off into little games of catch that heat up into
\nthrowing matches, the smack of the fungo bat, lazy jogging
\ninto right field, big smiles and arcs of tobacco juice,
\nand the talk that gives a cool, easy feeling to the air,
\ntalk among men normally silent, normally brittle and a little
\nangry with the empty promise of their lives. But they chatter
\nand say rock and fire, babe, easy out, and go right ahead
\nand pitch to the boy, but nothing fancy, just hard fastballs
\nright around the belt, and the kid takes the first two
\nbut on the third pops the bat around so quick and sure
\nthat they pause a moment before turning around to watch
\nthe ball still rising and finally dropping far beyond
\nthe abandoned tractor that marks left field. Holy shit.
\nThey’re pretty quiet watching him round the bases,
\nbut then, what the hell, the kid knows how to hit a ball,
\nso what, let’s play some goddamned baseball here.
\nAnd so it goes. The next time up, the boy gets a look
\nat a very nifty low curve, then a slider, and the next one
\nis the curve again, and he sends it over the Allis Chalmers,
\nhigh and big and sweet. The left field just stands there, frozen.
\nAs if this isn’t enough, the next time up he bats left-handed.
\nThey can’t believe it, and the pitcher, a tall, mean-faced
\nman from Okarche who just doesn’t give a shit anyway
\nbecause his wife ran off two years ago leaving him with
\nthree little ones and a rusted-out Dodge with a cracked block,
\nleans in hard, looking at the fat catcher like he was the sonofabitch
\nwho ran off with his wife, leans in and throws something
\nout of the dark, green hell of forbidden fastballs, something
\nthat comes in at the knees and then leaps viciously towards
\nthe kid’s elbow. He swings exactly the way he did right-handed
\nand they all turn like a chorus line toward deep right field
\nwhere the ball loses itself in sagebrush and the sad burnt
\ndust of dustbowl Oklahoma. It is something to see.<\/p>\n

But why make a long story long: runs pile up on both sides,
\nthe boy comes around five times, and five times the pitcher
\nis cursing both God and His mother as his chew of tobacco sours
\ninto something resembling horse piss, and a ragged and bruised
\nSpalding baseball disappears into the far horizon. Goodnight,
\nIrene. They have lost the game and some painful side bets
\nand they have been suckered. And it means nothing to them
\nthough it should to you when they are told the boy’s name is
\nMickey Mantle. And that’s the story, and those are the facts.
\nBut the facts are not the truth. I think, though, as I scan
\nthe faces of these old men now lost in the innings of their youth,
\nit lying there in the weeds behind that Allis Chalmers
\njust waiting for the obvious question to be asked: why, oh
\nwhy in hell didn’t they just throw around the kid, walk him,
\nafter he hit the third homer? Anybody would have,
\nespecially nine men with disappointed wives and dirty socks
\nand diminishing expectations for whom winning at anything
\nmeant everything. Men who knew how to play the game,
\nwho had talent when the other team had nothing except this ringer
\nwho without a pitch to hit was meaningless, and they could go home
\nwith their little two-dollar side bets and stride into the house
\nsinging If You’ve Got the Money, Honey, I’ve Got the Time
\nwith a bottle of Southern Comfort under their arms and grab
\nDixie or May Ella up and dance across the gray linoleum
\nas if it were V-Day all over again. But they did not
\nAnd they did not because they were men, and this was a boy.
\nAnd they did not because sometimes after making love,
\nafter smoking their Chesterfields in the cool silence and
\nlistening to the big bands on the radio that sounded so glamorous,
\nso distant, they glanced over at their wives and noticed the lines
\ngrowing heavier around the eyes and mouth, felt what their wives
\nfelt: that Les Brown and Glenn Miller and all those dancing couples
\nand in fact all possibility of human gaiety and light-heartedness
\nwere as far away and unreachable as Times Square or the Avalon
\nballroom. They did not because of the gray linoleum lying there
\nin the half-dark, the free calendar from the local mortuary
\nthat said one day was pretty much like another, the work gloves
\nlooped over the doorknob like dead squirrels. And they did not
\nbecause they had gone through a depression and a war that had left
\nthem with the idea that being a man in the eyes of their fathers
\nand everyone else had cost them just too goddamn much to lay it
\nat the feet of a fifteen year-old-boy. And so they did not walk him,
\nand lost, but at least had some ragged remnant of themselves
\nto take back home. But there is one thing more, though it is not
\na fact. When I see my friend’s father staring hard into the bottomless
\nwell of home plate as Mantle’s fifth homer heads toward Arkansas,
\nI know that this man with the half-orphaned children and
\nworthless Dodge has also encountered for the first and possibly
\nonly time the vast gap between talent and genius, has seen
\nas few have in the harsh light of an Oklahoma Sunday, the blonde
\nand blue-eyed bringer of truth, who will not easily be forgiven.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As we enter the baseball season (for real addicts, that began with the spring training season!), I thought I’d share one of my very favourite poems. While baseball isn’t a great love of mine, I do have fond memories of watching my sons play. 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