Breaking Ball

How great to believe that fried chicken
for early supper was a strike, Mom fussing
about clothes scattered on the floor
before a big game a ball.

Just listen to the whomp
against the brick wall of our house, my fastball
hitting the sweet spot inside the chalk-drawn
strike zone.

Just imagine the skinny, freckled southpaw,
aged eleven, hoping he’d be the next
Sandy Koufax. Will the day come when a baseball
seems like the ghost of someone
he used to know?

And what was Uncle Richard
thinking, even if egged on by my dad
who called him “the Babe”, when he grabbed
the catcher’s mit and squatted.

From the first pitch, I loved
a new game ball, skin soft as a pumpkin lily,
but not more than a ball in play,
discolored by dirt, grass stain, maybe even blood,
slightly warped by blunt trauma with
a blonde Louisville Slugger.

In my dreams I counted the miracle
of 108 waxed red cotton stitches: 108 to make
Hindu pitchers remember their mantra; 108 to
make Taoist pitchers thank their sacred stars; 108
to make Tibetan pitchers repent their evil deeds.

Every game the dirt pile
I would stand on in the middle
of the diamond felt like Mt. Olympus.

Every wind-up felt like being sucked up
in a tornado— pulling the right knee to the right
elbow, turning the chest
toward first, hiding the ball below
the left knee—
while riding a pogo stick.

In a vacuum, the terminal velocity
of a baseball and a body are the same.
Should I also throw my body in parabolic
kamikaze flight toward homeplate?

Get the hips free by pushing off
the front of the rubber. When the right leg stops
the torso, the left arm uncocks
like a pistol shot. Duchamp’s nude descending
the stairway from heaven should
have been a big league pitcher.

Then, resting my middle finger, like a lover,
inside the ball’s long seam,
I pulled down hard to make it rotate
thirteen times, and not reveal
its true nature— that it was a killer, that its color
was black—lights out—until
the final two-foot break.

In the front yard, we heard Sam
the Sham sing “Wooly Bully” on the kitchen radio.
Chicken sputtered in the frying pan.
And blood from the Babe’s nose flowed between
his fingers, dripped off
his white shirted elbows into the grass.

Old Woman at the Well

If I never took Sunday walks with you
to the old home place, if I never held you over
the well’s wooden edge and guided the cool metal
dipper to your lips, if the shaft of darkness
wasn’t there in dreams for you to fathom,
then you might not feel the rough hole in the bucket
and worry about your unquenchable thirst.

Let me tell you about the sad little boy who was
your father.
He waited in the blazing sun with a dipper of
water for his mother picking tobacco to put food
on the table.
Every day she’d tie that boy to the windlass
of her spirit and lower him into the merciful
darkness.
He’d sing out the damn cat’s in the well again.
He’d touch with blind fingers the pickaxe claw
marks of the old men who dug down to the deep
water.

Our bucket runneth over, saith the preacher.
But the dirt seeped through our pores, because
the land found its level in us.
We wove pine roots over our heads, stacked up
walls of white flint.
There is a story in the Bible about Jesus asking
a woman to draw some water for him.
I don’t think it happened that way, but still
we should learn to have wary faith.
There is a sun to parch us, and underground
a river of living water to carry us to the end of the row.

My memory floods back then sinks heavily to
the bottom of the rope’s reach.
The splashes of light break the black circle, the rope
coils again around the windlass effortlessly.
When you poison a man’s well, be very sure
of what you’re doing, be very sure.