Real Life Begins The Day After Opening Day

The sportswriter Thomas Boswell wrote that "time begins on Opening Day." Baseball, he was speaking of, and in many ways he was correct. Six straight months of daily drama and the holy grail of boxscores: there definitely is something to celebrate. A baseball-loving friend of mine, though, says that Opening Day is for tourists; the real fans show up to the ballpark for the next game. Case in point--the seemingly-going-nowhere Cleveland Indians opened their season yesterday to a sellout crowd of 42,000 fans, and got thumped. Today, they got thumped again in front of barely 9,000 fans, the smallest crowd in Jacobs/Progressive Field history. At 0-2, the pessimist in me wonders if they'll ever be closer to playing .500 ball all season.

But the optimist in me is thrilled baseball is back. So, in honor not of Opening Day but the rest of the season, I'm going to share my "greatest hit" poem here today. This has been published in a couple of places over the years, and is still a favorite when I give a reading. Somewhere, unseen ever by me, is a video of a performance of the poem I gave at the National Poetry Slam in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1994. My slam team and I split the poem into a four-voice piece and we rocked the house that night. I'd love to see the video sometime. Anyway, a year or so after writing the poem, I found this passage in The Journals of John Cheever, written in the late summer of 1963, when I was just an infant. It's all the validation I ever need: "I think that the task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony."



Catch Me


I'm a foul ball.
You see, this is how I picture it:

Wednesday night and 8,716 fans
make old Cleveland Stadium
look like a cherry cheesecake tin
in the refrigerator with no
discernible pieces left,
just sparse hunks of
graham cracker crust,
blobs of cheesecake,
and a stray cherry
here and there.

Before the game umpire Rocky Roe rubs
Delaware River mud all over me,
deep into me, hiding my gloss.

And you've been here hours
squirming in those wooden seats
because George the guy from your office
is passionate and says,
“If you miss batting practice, you miss the whole game”
and he's bragging to Linda from finance
about the strings he pulled to get these seats
“You'll be able to hear 'em swearing at the ump”
and you kind of wish you were high up
so you could see the lake
and you and your friend Stacy look through
George's binoculars at the players' good butts
and you're glad George has a crush on Linda, not you.

And I wait in a bag for hours.
Drunks behind you get another beer
for another inning.
A well-lit plane buzzes the horseshoe
in the almost black night sky;
I'm anxious for contact, baby, and I hope
I'm not a homerun to the alley
where I'll wind up in a security guard's hands
and spend my life in batting practice.
I want human contact.

And now in the seventh the ball girl
and her fat fingers walks me
and a few other balls up to Rocky
who shoves us in a thin pocket
and you and Stacy return
from the “scummy” rest room
and George too drunk now says
“You should see the men's room, you gotta piss in a trough”
and Linda laughs
and you and Stacy share an Arctic Blast
and I'm flying out to Wickander's glove
and his rosined up left hand
grips me across my seams
and I start wishing wishing
to be swatted high backwards
and you're actually a little drunk now you realize and

OW

and I'm free flying like God spinning
up up and back and a congregation
bussed from Bentleyville
screams and stands and watches me
and dreams as I stop climbing
and open wide my eyes
and fall with the ease of love
and a bald guy leans his fat
Docker shorts legs into the blue upper deck rail
and looks at me like money
and offers me his arms
and I pray I don't go easily
and I spin through his fingers painlessly
and head down past an empty loge
blue plastic tarp-covered chairs down
and you and Stacy scream
and hold your arms up helplessly
and George elbows Linda aside
“I got it honey”
(his first words of affection)
and I'm so happy
and I give myself up
and smack George on his shoulder
and bounce off Linda's head
(she'll remember the bump lovingly tomorrow)
and I land softly in your screaming dreamy
soft hands like an egg
tossed from Lonnie Beauchamp
your seventh grade love at the school picnic
and you hold me to thousands of cheers
and scream madly and hug me to your cleavage
oblivious to my 108 double stitches
and I smile knowing
I'll be lost
in your closet
for life.