Abandoned baseball fields
and feedlots in my mind'
span the distance between
pastures and filling stations.
Games from childhood,
those small-town diamond-gatherings with pizza-
joint sponsored jerseys
and open outfields where
the ball could roll
                                forever
if you really got a hold of it.

Here, in this other steer-city', once more I play
Though my back is sore, my mind
remembers pushing through an inside-the park
run home.
It rolled and rolled while I tripped on each corner
of those three plastic safe squares.
I saw the tom-boy with short hair behind the dugout
and asked her if she saw--
that night I thought she came to see me--
perhaps she might have known.
I have, not since then.

Shoeless, I meander on this base-path
holding my hands on my sides
to feel the parts my neighbor girl had
told me made the other boys
men; this distinction
what is good and what is not
was presented to me by foolish children, still
trying to become women-- AM I NOT A MAN!

I scream.

Somehow, these parts hang from my body,
supported by my well-toned calves--
My ankles, *****! My ankles are fine with
and without shoes.
Are the friendship bracelets from boys
that you got at camp in Colorado
not tattered by time now?
I have that trim abdomen you asked for
that triangle where my thighs converge with
torso, like you imagined theirs did
in the dark
while they were tasting all the
nothingness
inside you.

I can be like them, in my fantasy
of hitting the ball that rolls out toward yellow, singeing tallgrass
relieved by Summer evening thunderstorms which let me
ride quietly with my parents
in the backseat of our mom's pewter suburban,
with a box of kleenex always part-empty
crumpled beneath the passenger seat I sat behind.
My younger sister looked at the floor
while I saw
through our countryside with clear-gray
thoughtfulness and ease.

Instead of leaving from home, today,
I started on first base, in the park,
where I walked through
the right-field boundary without
consternation.
Look at strangers on the sidewalk,
and call my shot were they to take my things.
I feel my toes dig into dirt where no holes or even
placeholders were left to chance
vandalism or theft, I suppose.
I'm a thief, stealing seconds with my
piroueting-silence--
punctuated by mindless cylinders, pulsating.
Motorcycles are what they have; men.
Now, what she’s looking for, that girl which is
every woman.

(My bike is still there, I notice, taking an imaginary lead.)

A man with work and maybe a sense
of humor
that makes me roll my eyes.
But she thinks he's funny,
because she's simple, and-- after all-- she knows
those knees won't bend that way
                                       forever.
My adult work is walking, haggard, toward third
watching the adolescent couple running scared
from one another, when
minutes before they kissed; I laughed more loudly at them
than the garbage-fed birds who did roughly the same thing.

I walk toward home, where last Fall’s leaves
still loiter on the ground
that’s dug in
the way a timid batter would scrape earth,
cover his feet and wait to walk.
As a catcher, crouching behind a different kind
that afternoon, those older boys, with triangle-
torso-thighs and muscular limbs
came charging through me
and took my place
beside my girlfriend in the stands.

It was his motorbike that got there faster.

This is how home becomes crusted with dirt,
alternating apprehension and collision
must be wiped from the strike zone
Before I can wag fingers between
the legs to show exactly where to put it
in the top half of the ninth.
Those motorcycle-men don't get a whiff
of any pitch
or breezy desert air from down the chalky bluffs. In my hometown,
they may have felt a part in her that I could never be.
Dark drops beneath her sooty tail pipe
shades and forms are all I see.
But when I go inside, I still hear the echo
of car doors from my sister, mom and dad:

--thwack, Thwack. Thwack!

Each strike reverberating in the glove of our garage.
Every flimsy-ankled batter dispersed,
just like the infrequent pinging of our cooling engine
after the key has been removed. Lowering
a barrier, between the boys and men,
I watch wet cement like a warning track
backed by a white,
metal-reinforced plywood fence.
Through plexi-glass, I see that it came down
from the ceiling
the ordering presence of separation
suspended from my father's ceiling beams.
Solitary base-runner, stranded in this
half of the inning;
                            the home team
doesn't need to bat.
Still, she's rolling past me through thick, tall grass,
well-watered by a wetter climate,
in the empty fields at
Elmwood park this Spring.