October 2016
Steve Klepetar
sfklepetar@stcloudstate.edu
sfklepetar@stcloudstate.edu
My poems for October focus on baseball, in honor of the World Series. I used to play and was a big fan, and I know a bit about the history of the game, but I haven’t seen a pitch this year. Baseball interests me less and less as a game played on the field, and more and more as a mythic space where flawed and wondrous beings, like Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Willy Mays did amazing things.
“Ninety percent of this game is half mental. The other half is physical.”
-attributed to Yogi Berra
-attributed to Yogi Berra
|
|
Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov Bobby Richardson
October 1960
Raskolnikov stood before my mirror
more than once, listening to Beethoven
play, wondering who would dare
release such music all at once on a world.
Drinking tea with lorry drivers
on the London to Glasgow run, he spoke
with them of purity in murder
and reflecting devices on the motorways,
all in French so they could not understand.
Later that day he challenged my father
to a game of chess. I was only eleven
then, and bored. So I watched the Yankees
trounce Pittsburgh ten to nothing,
and even Raskolnikov cheered when
Bobby Richardson hit a grand slam
in the bottom of the first. He lost
the game, they had a drink. That night
he told me a story and put me to bed,
kissing me gently on the forehead,
but all in French so I could not understand.
The Negro Leagues: A Praise Song
Song in the wind, a Kansas City wind rising
in shadow, snappin' at dust like Satchel's curve,
hitter dazed on his heels, or a streaking blur
along the river, Cool Papa Bell slidin' into second base.
Listen to the clean song struggling behind forbidden lines,
rising like Bill Foster's fastball or a Josh Gibson blast
disappearing in a thousand shirtsleeves and white
dresses, bleachers on a steamy Pittsburgh night.
Hear the song of young men, see them in old photographs
lean and smiling, eager with joy of leather and wood,
white lime on grass, dust popping from the bases,
hot summer wind in every city from Houston to New York,
Harlem to Mobile, beautiful and strong.
And free, at least in the game's sweet possibilities,
in opposition of muscle, heart and will,
in true equality of guts and mind and skill.
See them crowded behind the color line, see them in
shadow,
cheer now as they emerge into light--
Judy Johnson and Willie "El Diablio" Wells,
Oscar Charleston and Rube Foster,
Buck Leonard and Buck O'Neil--
let all their names become faces, and, prophetic as comets,
fitting as the night game lights or brilliant patterns in the
stars,
write their numbers and their fame, and let their faces
blaze across the sky!
First published in Slow Trains, 2008.
Li Bo and the Long Homerun
We meet for lunch at a small Vietnamese market
across from the mall. I order pork Pad Thai,
he orders Pho with meatballs.
The food is delicious, his bowl of Pho
large enough to wash his feet in.
“I could write a poem about this bowl,” he says,
“the roundness of its edge, a universe without boundaries –
expanding, then shrinking away to nothing.”
“Your mouth is a black hole,” I tell him, as he sucks
broth with such pleasure that his face becomes a star.
Later, we go to a ball game, sit in the bleachers
in a light rain. No one is there. Both teams dress
in red. The ball echoes loudly as it smacks
the catcher’s glove. Umpires move like shadows
across the grass. “How like a funeral,” he says.
“See the lugubrious way men walk to first,
how the manager paces to the mound, gesturing
in that hieratic way? I am lost in a thousand
slow movements, wandering without sorrow
in a ritual of grief. In this steady rain, I am assuaged.”
That night, as he listens to the steady drum
of rain, he writes a poem about a ball hurtling
through space at nearly the speed of light.
His eyes narrow as he writes. His pen scratches
across the white page leaving black marks,
crow tracks startling a wide, flat field of snow.
How long he watches as it arcs up into the lights,
then tumbles beyond the fielder’s outstretched glove.
By the time it crashes into the stands, his hands
are old, the paper brittle as if hundreds years had passed.
First published in Carnival, 2015
We meet for lunch at a small Vietnamese market
across from the mall. I order pork Pad Thai,
he orders Pho with meatballs.
The food is delicious, his bowl of Pho
large enough to wash his feet in.
“I could write a poem about this bowl,” he says,
“the roundness of its edge, a universe without boundaries –
expanding, then shrinking away to nothing.”
“Your mouth is a black hole,” I tell him, as he sucks
broth with such pleasure that his face becomes a star.
Later, we go to a ball game, sit in the bleachers
in a light rain. No one is there. Both teams dress
in red. The ball echoes loudly as it smacks
the catcher’s glove. Umpires move like shadows
across the grass. “How like a funeral,” he says.
“See the lugubrious way men walk to first,
how the manager paces to the mound, gesturing
in that hieratic way? I am lost in a thousand
slow movements, wandering without sorrow
in a ritual of grief. In this steady rain, I am assuaged.”
That night, as he listens to the steady drum
of rain, he writes a poem about a ball hurtling
through space at nearly the speed of light.
His eyes narrow as he writes. His pen scratches
across the white page leaving black marks,
crow tracks startling a wide, flat field of snow.
How long he watches as it arcs up into the lights,
then tumbles beyond the fielder’s outstretched glove.
By the time it crashes into the stands, his hands
are old, the paper brittle as if hundreds years had passed.
First published in Carnival, 2015
Joe DiMaggio
Li Bo Meets Joe DiMaggio in the Underworld
Li Bo sits, observing a mountain’s
green reflection in the pale blue water
of a quiet pool. A breeze ripples
the surface, blurring the edges of this scene:
solid mountain, with its golden trees
and plunging ravines swirling insubstantial as clouds.
“What’re you doing?” DiMaggio asks, leaning
over Li Bo’s shoulder.
“Writing a poem in my head about this mountain’s
reflection in the pool, how the wind transforms
rock and trees to mist. Would you like to hear
what I have so far?”
“Do you know who I am?,” DiMaggio demands.
“Everybody knows who you are: Joltin’ Joe,
the Yankee Clipper.”
“Goddamn right. I had 88 extra-base hits my first year
and didn’t win rookie of the fucking year*. Had 96
my second year and they gave the MVP to fucking Charlie Gehringer.”
“True,” answers Li Bo with a slight smile, “but you won it in ’41**,
the year Williams hit .406. The strange world ebbs and it flows.”
“So? I had that 56 game hitting streak, and we won the goddamn World Series.”
He sits down in the grass by Li Bo and the two gaze
almost companionably into the pool, where
the mountain sways and breaks apart and fuses
in the water, a great, green wedge of heartbreaking
loveliness. They are silent in the clear, warm afternoon.
Birds sing, invisible in the neighboring trees.
Then Li Bo recites: “Here is a mountain floating in a blue pool.
Trees cling to its body like green-gold hair. Sometimes it fragments,
almost vanishes, then comes together, like armies in the distance battling for kings.”
Notes:
From 1940 – 46, only the Chicago baseball writers voted for Rookie of the Year. Jackie Robinson won the first Rookie of the Year Award voted on by the national baseball press (there was only one for both leagues then) in 1947. DiMaggio’s anger here is both posthumous and anachronistic.
DiMaggio also beat out Ted Williams for MVP, by one vote, in 1947, though Williams had a much higher batting average and more homeruns.
First published in Cyclamens and Swords, 2015
Little League
Note: "Li Bo and the Long Homerun" and "Li Bo Meets Joe DiMaggio in the Underworld" are from my
latest chapbook, The Li Bo Poems, available from Flutter Press: https://www.createspace.com/6153287.
latest chapbook, The Li Bo Poems, available from Flutter Press: https://www.createspace.com/6153287.
©2016 Steve Klepetar
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF