PAD 7: Not A Baseball Poem

Jackson's team didn't win today, but almost, it was very close. He made a diving catch behind first base and dropped the ball, even though everyone thought he had caught it, even the umpire. Your son has a problem with honesty, said another parent, which I guess is true since he told the umpire he dropped the ball and the runner was safe. We all laughed, even Jackson, who takes these games so lightly, I wish he took his life lightly, too, the anxieties of his adolescence creep up around him day and night.

Today's poem starts with baseball and ends with pregnancy. I'm grieving for Stella who is separating from me so easily, and I am realizing that after my life of keeping my distance, of holding my mind separate from her, she is going to leave for real very soon, just as I am learning to love her with my mind as well as my heart.

(Suddenly) The Doe

After Jackson’s baseball jersey, number 10,
dries, the Gatorade splots, ketchup smeary and
grass-stained dirt scrubbed out quickly in cold
water, I open the front door to move
back against the house my pink folding chair,
on which I had dried it, actually on which
it lay while the April sun dried the damp
places, and step into the yard, and there
see her leap up, too awkward to leap
quickly, it’s more of a slosh and heave,
like a dinghy too heavily laden with
children in life jackets, the bag full of lunches,
and the blanket, soft blue and oyster shell plaid
I remember from my childhood, bumping
against the side of the bigger boat as the last
kid steps in, and he falls into his seat, as
the little boat soon turns and lumbers away
toward the beach, an up stumble onto her sharp
small black hooves, butt and tail caught in old
holly, before she backs off and escapes through
torn chicken wire and falling fencing, long
ineffective again her and others of her
kind, brown deer who continue to thrive
at the edge of the city of Cupertino in
shady garden corners, like this one
where she rested until I came, with her
burden in her brown belly, with my clean clothes.

I think it might be fun to write a whole sequence of poems, in which the word 'suddenly' never appears, but which describe a series of events that do happen that quickly, in a present that doesn't really exist, between the series of moments that are either the past the past the past or the future the future the future.

PAD 4 & 5: Yes, it's discouraging but that's okay

Since I've taken such a stand -- write a poem a day! -- nobody has come to the blog to comment or -- probably even -- to not comment. And it was a drastic stand for me to take, and the commitment is hard. But at least I love the outcome. I wonder if I can take a similar stand with regard to losing weight, or flossing my teeth every night, exercising enough -- only yesterday I promised my physical therapist I'd stretch every day and today I have not. There is still tonight.


Yesterday's PAD (April 22) should have been this:


For Michael's Heart

For Michael's heart
I would. And he
doesn't need to know.
Weights and measures,
scales, turning the pages.
This faucet, that
doorknob suffices in beauty
or does not, but when
we don't ask those
questions, I propose,
the heart hears voices
filled with answers
still.



Today's poem is going to be harder. I want to write about Paul, my contractor's foreman, who's from the Bronx, but who speaks Spanish to the guys working on the crew remodeling our house. Oscar and Jose, they were on the roof today, pulling out the old sky light, framing in the space for the new one. Paul was babbling on in Spanish, and then he said "siente and a quarter" and then more Spanish, and then "siente and three quarters" and it caught my eye -- as if he'd flung a fly fishing line at me and snagged my ear with the fluffy feathery hook. Ouch -- got me to turn my head, and when I said it back to him, they all laughed, all three of them. I want to put this in a poem, but I don't know how to. And, even though this is a lot of writing, this blog entry does NOT count as pad. This paragraph is not a poem. Even if I call it one. Not even a prose poem. I don't believe in that form, anyway. (A topic for another day). So now what?

I put this idea forward as a poem a couple of days ago, but that was cheating. As penance, I made it into a sestina for today's pad.

The New Season: A Baseball Sestina

Oh boy, I can smell it in the evening, the boy
Glinting in a white uniform, still clean, the ball
Fresh in his hand, now fleeing from his hand, now away from him
Fleeing through even the new air
And the new grass, green
The way a new green is brighter next

To a new clay infield, next
To the boy
Leaping across the new green
Outfield where he catches the ball
Like a new boy. The air
Is not really new, but these molecules belong to him

In a way that the grass belongs to him
And the next
Swing of the bat through the new air
Belongs to the boy
With a new taste in his mouth, and the ball
Still white, not yet having met not even one green

Blade of grass is his. You put up the green
Umbrella in the stands for him,
I bring my cooler, we grip our hats, we clench our fists into new balls
Of baseball fury, rows of brand new parents next
To definitely not wiser rows of parents, my boy
And your boy battling out there in early spring air

Pushing the fine tasting air
Back and forth between themselves, across green
Sprawling fields, themselves sprawling one boy
After the next
Into the dirt, their bodies rolling full out with the hymns
Of sliding, ballads of dropping the ball,

Haiku of pop-up, ball
Drops out of air
Into glove. Or in the next
Inning perhaps an entire symphony of green
And brown stains up and down every inch of him,
My boy.

It’s a game of give my boy take your boy glove hat bat ball
Yell for him, spit into that clean gleaming air
The green vowels, the white consonants, the next game.