a moist evening air swollen among trees laden with
fruit, blue hubbard feigning sleep in the field: this
hour of surrender and hope, abandonment and arising,
counting our losses and waiting till next year, while
my late-life child leans into baseball, into its Proverbs,
its Numbers and Kings, sees the infield fly rule as
a true blessing for runners, learns how Carroll Hardy
solves one riddle and Gene Conley the other,
catechizes how the heavens tilted on her first birthday,
the Sox harvesting that fall, then again and again with
only a few turns in purgatory to quicken the tongue, yet
still understanding the truth of that local wisecrack –
that if all the folks claiming they’re just staying long enough
to witness an end to The Curse and then will pass with a smile,
if that were ever a true bond, there wouldn’t be enough coffins
to go round – though there always are, of course: pharaoh,
pauper, and priest sliding home together in the dust, but still,
still, the game’s long tutorial in humility yields to that first
glimpse of an impossibly green earth beyond this strict tunnel –
how we lift first toward the sacred field, and then descend.