Playing Baseball

by James Como (August 2017)

 

Homeplate, Paul Ward

 

 

I miss being part of it, now I’m broken.
Let me tell you what I mean.

Tracking the ball, a lean path,
then snatching it cold.  
Back-to-the-infield, over the shoulder,
nailing the fool who thought it would fall.
“Isn’t he older?  Can he be that quick?”  
On the bases taking third: intuitive call.
Or hitting a bloop, see them blinking,
then, when they’re in, going deep for a song.
Fake here, dart there, always thinking.

Yet these together (even the errors?)
were not the greatest joy.  An epiphany:
daily life, that fading quotidian, is the fiction.  
Hah.  It is the field cannot be undone:
the geometry within, exacting and true,
the expanse beyond, a sky blue but tricky.  
An intelligent design, one world, whole,
no field of dreams this: rather the
Real Thing, where abideth a Soul.

 

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James Como is the author, most recently, of The Tongue is Also a Fire: Essays on Conversation, Rhetoric and the Transmission of Culture . . . and on C. S. Lewis (New English Review Press, 2015).

 
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