I watch the smoke mount
In great strides above the city.
I belong to no one.
	—Charles Simic

He was always an idea, a country boy 
so battered, so drowned in that small 
pond on the next farm, so blond in the 
wind with the fastballs firing through. 
He reached down to touch the grass. 
Someone offered him a pair of spikes
but he pointed to the callus on his sole. 
He leaped up near the fence and hauled 
in the dented white ball. Sometimes he cried. 
Between innings he sometimes grew wings. 
He bit his nails and spat seeds. 
Later, in the batter’s box, he became a myth, 
liquid lightning, his eyes burning in summer heat. 
Sometimes nothing happened at all — 
a walk or a groundout to second base. 
He spoke to no one about the constant pain 
in his upper back. 
Sometimes after the game, he tried to stand,
head bent over a puddle, a small drowned man 
with skin green as algae, hair floating in the river like weeds.
                        

“I like the way you talk about me,” she said, 
“so quietly, with such wonder in your voice,
 as if I were a queen in a fairy tale, one who rides 
the wind, singing to the dark moon.” 
It wasn’t that I was such a fan. I only had seen 
three of her films (“Come on,” she said, 
“they’re just movies!”) But her face rose 
in my imagination like a ghostly sun. 
Everywhere I looked, the desert stretched 
its hot sands. She rose in the sky again and again. 
The way she died, so terrible, such a misery 
of weight and loneliness. They buried her 
again and again, each time bringing up 
the president, the playwright and the home run 
king, each time planting her like a cactus,
which could grow wings and, at Christmas time, 
soar in the cold air, a rocket launched toward the stars.