1963-1988
Heat and haze. The granular frayed-ends of late light
-the half-light of late afternoon, nearly evening-
and the dead center of a summer field. Heat-waves and dust.
Dust-haze. So the filthy leaves burnish like broken-in leather,
oily from a distance, and deepen when a breeze hits.
The percussive wood-crack-boys and girls run in the heat- waves,
wading, in a drift, as if underwater, through nothing
but more humid air. From where I stand, petrified but happy,
holding a bat and starting to take my cuts,
this play of light has much to do with the way the scene
occurs: a figure on first, a figure, now, held at second-
too few of us to fill the necessary field. And Ghost
runner on third! a voice cracks, calling at my back, when
I turn squinting outward into the cream sky.
This could be either memory or metaphor, you understand
we are as close to love as we’ve ever been. Field-chatter.
A batter’s breeze. All I have to imagine-
across the diamond’s thistle and late steam, and dust-motes
like delicate sand afloat, and a distraction of nervesis-
what’s already here, filling in for an absence
and particularized at will. A training ground for romantics.
So the boy with the bruised face knocks a bubble
of sweat off his lip, glaring at me, and begins his wind-up.
Desire can be this clarifying-down twenty-five years
and some fifty feet of heat-shimmer and loneliness,
light now like a lotion, a hazy presence at third becomes
a real runner, because we’ve wished it so—a run, if I’m lucky
enough to hit the pitch wobbling at me like a feather.
But there is one more thing. I’m looking down the line
as I swing—as far back now as my life goes—where the base still
blurs in the gray-white whirl. A ghost. A dazzle of white.
-Or the white-noise of what I’ve always wanted. —
Until it’s you, of course, in the utterly breathless heat.
You, dug-in and grinning, as I swing-at this moment
when the field itself dissolves into tiny abstract zeroes
and a back-wash of vaporous light.
Just like it’s always been.
Heat and haze. You. Waving. Beginning to run this way.
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