– as the regular season draws to its natural end,
thoughts of Willie Mays remain
When the distance
between words and worlds
laced on a pitch stitched of letters
(an MVP, newly departed, no longer old)
turns suddenly cold, all tickets right
and left of center, now sold,
I hope you’ll swing on invisible wings
and continue churning as the world keeps hurting.
Words thrown like curve balls
and sliders and sinkers
and upside-down and inside-out
dividers. The bats come out at night,
torrential rain or crystallized moonlight,
and remind us that even when we miss
what our skin can no longer feel–
that kiss, leather in palm, the soft mist
of the unexpected
rain shower, the bar of Dove soap
on skin more wrinkled than any pug
mascot, it’s still worth running laps
around bases covered in mud.
We’re counting. One. Two. Three.
strikes built of prepositions on propositions
and ballpark wishes, clinched–
at bats, on mats, of caps, for maps
to help us make meaning of a world
spinning diamonds at bat.
When the scoreboard no longer tallies
runs batted in, we keep swinging.
sliding, storming the night sky–
to say, hey,
the stadium lights still, still a delight.