Someone had been walking in and out
Of the world without coming
To much decision about anything.
The sun seemed too hot most of the time.
There weren't enough birds around
And the hills had a silly look
When he got on top of one.
The girls in heaven, however, thought
Nothing of asking to see his watch
Like you would want someone to tell
A joke--"Time," they'd say, "what's
That mean--time?", laughing with the edges
Of their white mouths, like a flutter of paper
In a madhouse. And he'd stumble over
General Sherman or Elizabeth B.
Browning, muttering, "Can't you keep
Your big wings out of the aisle?" But down
Again, there'd be millions of people without
Enough to eat and men with guns just
Standing there shooting each other.
So he wanted to throw something
And he picked up a baseball.
[The Boy in Baseball by Liam Rector; ©PIF Magazine..
"While you were considering the two hundred families with all thee power and yakking about enemies of France,
I suddenly turned to the window now covered with frost and began to make a sketch of the new possibilities.
The sketch inadvertently reveals the boy in baseball.."]
[Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Baseball Canto", @ UPenn/©
"Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,
reading Ezra Pound,
and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the
Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto.."]
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Minnesota Bats
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