I knew a couple, in that once upon a time
Where fecundity was a going concern in our circle of friends,
Who’d lost another child mid-pregnancy
(It may have been the third time,
As such evils, oddly enough, tend to arrive as a trinity)
They’d fiercely, defiantly given the child a dozen names,
Including each of their saints’ names
(A finger to the eye of certain relatives,
Who’d implied and occasionally outright sniped
Recreation without procreation is the darkest of sins.)
They had, after a fashion, made a certain piece with all that transpired,
God’s will or vagaries of chance or something in-between,
But some weeks down the line the distaff part of the equation
Began to experience something akin to pure madness,
Finding evil portent and intent and all and sundry
Which they’d touched upon during pregnancy:
Doctors, in-laws, her spouse,
Even the fables they’d read to her unborn child
(The tale of the Three Little Pigs singled out for particular scorn;
We live in a ******* house made of brick, and what did that get us?
She all but screamed at her beleaguered husband.)
This all passed after a time, the ceasing of the episodes
Due to the end of some delayed post-partum depression, perhaps,
Or the grim realization that raging against some deaf deity
Is a fruitless, pointless, fretful strut across the stage,
But, in any case, life returned to normal, more or less,
Though her husband found it somewhat disconcerting
How, in the process of doing some semi-necessary remodeling
(Keep her busy, their pediatrician had told him in an aside)
She attacked the old walls in an unused bedroom upstairs
With something very much approximating fury,
The plaster-and-lath flying hither and yon,
The dust hanging in the air everywhere you looked,
Leaving a taste like ashes in their mouths for days afterward.

It is undeniable, when in the embrace of the great pipe *****
At the venerable old Episcopal church on Third Street,
Or wholly encircled by Tiffany-issue stained glass
At St. Joe’s in South Troy (ostensibly the “ironworker’s church”,
But gifted with its invaluable windows
Through a mixture of noblesse oblige, piety,
And a certain venal pride)
That there is a presence, a corporeality when the tune rises
From the pipes, be they iron or wholly human in origin,
Which is steadfast and implacable in the certitude of faith.

I’d heard the tune on another occasion,
Some half-dozen blocks north of the gaggle of churches,
Emanating from a squat, red-brick edifice
Which seemed a bit unsure of its own solidity,
As if the trust placed in mortar and block
Was somehow a bit presumptuous.
The voices were reedy, a tad threadbare and careworn,
And the accompaniment was unprepossessing
(A single guitar, perhaps, or an ancient and wobbly Casio
Rescued from the beyond by some kindhearted DPW worker)
And, though the voices were pitchy
And the harmonies a half-step or so amiss,
One hopes that it would constitute an acceptable offering,
Even not having fully shed the cloak of reticence
Which can be so difficult to unclasp on the road to devotion.

Well, some you lay, and some you marry,
(As if womankind is some thing
To be sifted, sorted, and graded
Like so many eggs or lima beans)
But then one comes, smudging all those lines in her wake,
Scattering such easy dichotomies to the winds
Like so many dandelion seeds,
A woman seemingly composed of nothing save some essence,
Yet substantial, fecund, prolific,
And you find yourself wholly unmoored
By no more than a glimpse of her,
The mere imagining of a word wafted your way
A thing of inexplicable delight,
An ecstasy all but *******,
But such dreams serve nothing more tangible
Than as reminders of your utter unworthiness,
Your tainted admixture of rank brass and tuna-can metal,
And so you vow to re-cast yourself
Into something which is worthy of her,
Or at least something demi-desirable,
But such a remaking proves your unmaking,
A transformation not of as the humble cocoon,
But one that leaves you cartoonish, less than a man,
Braying and barking, not even worthy of the scorn
Of she for whom you forsook everything
And yet you would do so again and again,
The bewitching and utter annihilation of all you were
A grail unto itself, an immaculate radiance
Which the tips of you fingers, the brush of your lips
Would leave irreparably sullied.

There exists all manner of confinement: bricks and bars, of course
The reward for having fallen out of favor with some jurist,
Black-robed and clad with a fitting solemnity,
But any number of others as well--all less tangible, less corporeal,
And, as such, all the more insidious.
The most forbidding of all confinements, though,
Are those of our own making,
Or (even more maddening, more exasperating) those of our own being,
The limits of our sight-lines at the horizon,
The boundaries of our own perception,
The tyranny of the senses.

Suffer my folly, then, to put out to sea
In the hope (though I fully understand
If you term it something else altogether) of finding
Some odd grail residing in the interval between dreams and the defined,
Though possessing can achieve nothing more
Than to taint it with the stench of the workaday.
I know that this mad exercise in carpe diem will not likely end well;
My safe returns dependent on instruments and forecasts,
Man-made and consequently fallible.
When such time comes, keen some song of the dead for me
As you wail upon the beach, if you must;
I will have likely achieved some semblance of peace.

We do not, perhaps, expect the very sky
To descend upon us, all chunks and wedges
As it did upon the simple, deluded chick
Of the nursery rhyme of long ago
(A child’s verse, perhaps, but promulgated and purveyed
By those older, perhaps wiser, yet still wholly unable
To shake the terror of the meteorological and inexplicable.)
We have, as we have aged,
Eschewed the black-and-white of childhood cosmology
In order to make our gray-tinged bargain with the heavens,
Asking not for its benediction,
But content ourselves with negotiating
For a lack of outright malevolence,
And though our rationality tells us
It cannot come down on us chock-a-block and helter-skelter,
We nonetheless study the sky with wariness
Poorly cloaked as studious indifference.

He’d always had the fastball.
It was, according to the second-tier phys ed teachers
And young, un-tenured math instructors
Who comprised the area’s high school coaching community,
Unlike any pitch they’d ever seen,
And the hapless shortstops and left-fielders
Who meekly waved in its general direction as it crossed the plate
Simply shook their heads, glared out toward the mound,
Or, in the case of one chunky red-haired clean-up hitter
From up in Clearfield,
Threw a bat at him in a mix of embarrassment and frustration.
(He’d simply stood on the mound,
Grinning as the piece of wood sailed harmlessly by,
And he’d yelled back in at their bench,
Listen you bunch of woodchucks,
There ain’t nothing you can do to me
With a bat in your hands no way no how.)

His success was uninterrupted, unparalleled,
With no taint of failure or adversity
(He’d always told the scouts who asked him to pitch from the stretch
Mister, when I’m pitching, ain’t nobody gets on base.)
And when he’d signed his contract,
Which included a bonus of twenty-five hundred dollars
(Little more than chump change to the ballclub,
But all the **** money in the world to him),
He’d figured it was just the first step
In an inexorable process to the big time
The possibility that he could be no more than an afterthought
Never so much as crossing his mind,
But though he had the fastball, it was no more imposing
Than several dozen other pitchers in the organization,
And it had the tendency to be straight as a string
On its journey to home plate,
Easy prey for players who had grown up
Facing good pitching twelve months a year,
And his other offerings
(The notion of needing a Plan B on the mound
Having scarcely occurred to him)
Were rudimentary and unpolished things,
Child-like roundhouse curves,
Change-ups which announced themselves
Long before they ever left his hand,
Plus lacked what the scouts and developmental types
Liked to call a “projectable body”,
No six-foot-six, no frame that spoke of growth and untapped power.
He still had the dream, but offered the big club little to dream upon.

He spent a couple of years in short-season ball in Upstate New York,
(In a small, down-on-what-little-luck-it-ever-had city
Where the right field fence
Butted up against a maximum security prison)
Cleaning up the messes in blowout losses,
Soaking up innings on cold, damp early June evenings
In places like Watertown or Little Falls,
Where the threat of frost lingered almost until the summer solstice,
So that those arms which were part of the big team’s future wouldn’t be put at risk, Spending his late mornings and later evenings
In any number of identical shopping malls, Super 8’s and Comfort Inns,
Bars named The Draught Dodger or Pub-N-Grub,
Where the women of one A.M. appeared to be intoxicating, glamorous,
But were all dark roots and crow’s feet
In the grainy light of early morning,
Pale tell-tale halos on the left ring-finger,
The redhead of Erie indistinguishable from the blonde in Oneonta.

He knew that he was simply a spare part, a body to fill out a roster,
But come his third spring with the organization,
He’d asked--begged, really--for another full season,
One final shot to make good,
But the farm director just sat back and smiled ruefully.
Son, he said after a seemingly endless pause,
We’re all pretty much day-to-day.
After a few weeks back Upstate
(He’d only pitched once, to one batter,
Who he ended up walking on four pitches),
A new crop of polished collegians and high-school hotshots
Were signed on the dotted line and ready to roll,
And one night, just before the team bus was leaving for Batavia,
He was called in to the manager’s office,
Where he heard what he had dreaded,
But knew was coming as sure as sunrise:
End of the line, kid.
We have to let you go.

So he went home.  
He’d laid low at first,
Dodging the polite small talk or wordless looks
Which all boiled down to What are you doin’ back here?
Eventually, he emerged from his old bedroom at home,
And if someone at the Market Basket or the bar at the Kinzua House
Asked him what went wrong,
He’d shrug and say he’d got caught in a numbers game,
Or it was politics--The guys they spend a million bucks on
get a million chances, Y’know?
But he knew that for those kids
Who had never been good enough to dream,
The notion that Bobby Rockett couldn’t make it
Said something about their own futures
Which was too bleak, too awful to contemplate.


A couple of weeks after he was home,
His official release arrived in the mail,
The ballclub’s logo all but jumping off the envelope,
Bold , bright gold star with one point tailing off
In a hail of inter-stellar dust, comet-like, into nothingness.
He hadn’t bothered to open it before he chucked it into the trash bin
(Though he almost immediately regretted its loss,
His playing career already a different life,
With few tangible bits of proof to prove he’d been someone, something.)
He supposed he’d go get a job at the mill,
Or maybe go into selling insurance with his dad,
And there was always a pretty good semi-pro league in Pittsburgh
If he got the jones to do some pitching
(Still, that was a two hour drive each way,
And somehow he never just got around to doing that.)
Some nights, just before sunset,
He would drive out to the high school ballfield
Glove and bucket of ***** in hand,
And, wearing a good landing spot with his battered spikes,
He would throw (the motion so easy, so clean,)
Pitch after pitch across the plate,
The knowledge that his velocity was more or less undimmed
Leading him to smile grimly, almost conspiratorially to himself
As throw after throw rattled the backstop,
Sounding for all the world like so many metallic crows
Settling into a grove of scrub trees on a late August evening,
The nights growing imperceptibly longer
As they proceeded inexorably toward autumn.