Of Baseball, Poetry and the Human Condition




~~

From  “The Art of Fielding.”* by Chad Harbach

"You loved it,” he writes of the game (baseball), “because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about the Human Condition.

The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not."

~~
and thus, the circling noose grows ever small,
binding the obvious and unblinding the oblivious

more than the mere, poetry in baseball, for both forms of art,
knowledge intuited from watching the catcher's body weave
this way and that, a dancer en pointe, arms raised in worship,
addressing the heavens with a body's broad brush strokes,
all to catch with concentrated skill, a lazy, towering popup,
climaxing oft with an exclamation point -
a perilous desperation leap
into the dugout encampment of the inimical opposition

yeah, yeah, sure, sure,
you knew that,

tho daring to verbalize same,
before the age of thirty,
presumed maturity,
was not an act of the sane of heart,
or the sound of mind with body melded

what you dared not admit was that the conditional principle,
was primal and not tangential, though perhaps,
some itinerant fathers foolishly mumbled incoherently
of life's linkages and motifs parallel

of
that desperate beauty, the ferric magnetic irony,
that our full access pass to envisioning the finery,
imaging the stuff of our own daily creation genesis,
whether concocting undisciplined disassembled parts,
called words,
into a singular line, a stanza that froze your lungs from
the boredom of the regularity of heaving and breathing,

was in no way different
than the curvature of the boy's arm
in desperation outstretched, seeking spectacular safety for
a well hit ball of cork into a worn leather mitten and thus
confirming his humanity to the watching tribal membership

and these momentary moments of momentousness,
will live forever until we die, judged of equal stature,
a soldiers stripes, ribbons of his theaters of service,
medals of the honor and the errors of his own
truthful, youthful and crucial
human condition

two white coffee cups*

reveal every sip,
mark every drip,
the metaphorical  staining
of the man and the woman
in bed
on a Sunday morn,
each sipping and drip drinking
from white mismatched coffee cups

unleashes his tear ducts;
he sips the tear drips

now the coffee tear-infused tastes
just like a stained life,
a metaphor realized

~


and, to the young,
it comes with bitterest agony,
because it takes them unawares.
The older have learned to ever expect it.”

Abraham Lincoln

~~~

time is the seasoning spice,
rubbed into the unwanted go to hell gifted
cracks and crevices,
of aging,
ever deepening tracks of rusted orange paprika tears that are undepletable

experience, that cursed pretend friend,
has been-weathered worn upon our faces

you young think you have it all,
you cannot have my sorrows

though they come to  
me well awares
undisguised in shiny silver sunlight and
full moon bright,
whipped, collected and freight-weighed by the poundage

the tears of surprise are no wetter than mine
and surely but half as bitter as mine
than have accumulated and aged and bred permanence cursed down upon my
grayed hairs

you weep grievously
throw your body twisted to the floor
then you realize mine
is already there -
a cushion for you
and hardwood
my pillow

you have hope of repair -

making surprises treatable, tenable
and tentative

perhaps your gasp
of shock
louder than my grasp
of yet another cut's meaning

but learning to expect it
neither lessens it or
ameliorates

you want proof?

look upon me, come look upon me or better yet
look upon the portraiture
of Abraham Lincoln