They can wander in forgetting,
confused —
I suppose it’s me,
that I am the one confused
—
time folds so strangely.
Often the talk is trivialities:
household chores I ought to attend to, politics
— better yet, sports.
My father and I sit at that kitchen table,
tell the same stories
we always told,
pretending them new each time.
Dad has that one about Carl Yastrzemski,
how after a bogus called third strike
Yaz calmly bent down
and covered home plate with dirt and walked away,
never turning to acknowledge the enraged umpire
ejecting him from the game.
We laugh, smile sharing that one again.
And then I try to tell him about 2004,
how I’d thought it might be the sweet and solemn gesture
when I brought the sports pages and an old Sox cap
to the graveside the morning after they’d finally won it all.
You’d have loved to see it, Dad.
I looked out across the cemetery hill
and hundreds of others
had done the same
— baseball caps, pennants, mylar balloons,
catching the clear, tired light of an October morning
— all so happily telling the dead.
THE POETRY OF THE GAME