Baseball Poem

Lots of poets like to write about baseball. I posted a Marianne Moore one at the beginning of the season. It's okay, gets alittle corny, but that's fine, sometimes, especially when talking baout loving baseball, that's appropriate.

Anyway, I'm reading a book right now and have stopped to share the poem in it that I just (re) read (for the 100th time in my life.) I wanted to type it up and share. I think it's one of the most sensuous, funny and unexpected baseball poems out there. (Sensuous, funny and unexpected is also how I would describe the poet who penned the poem, one of my favorites--Bernadete Mayer.)

Carlton Fisk Is My Ideal

He wears a beautiful necklace
next to the beautiful skin of his neck
unlike the Worhtington butcher
Bradford T. Fisk (butchers always
have a crush on me), who cannot even oreder veal
except in whole legs of it.
Oh the legs of a catcher!
Catchers squat in a posture
that is of course inward denying orgasm
but Carlton Fisk, I could
model a whole attitude to spring
on him. And he is a leaper!
Like Walt Frazier or, better,
like the only white leaper,
I forget his name, in the ABA's
All-Star game half-time slam-dunk contest
this year. I think about Carlton Fisk in his
modest home in New Hampshire
all the time, I love the sound of his name
denying orgasm. Carlton & I
look out the window at spring's first
northeaster. He carries a big hero
across the porch of his home to me.
(He has no year-round Xmas tree
like Clifford Ray who handles the ball
like a banana). We eat & watch the storm
batter the buds balking on the trees
& cover the green of the grass
that my sister thinks is new grass.
It's last year's grass still!
And still there is no spring training
as I write this, March 16, 1976,
the year of the blizzard that sealed our love
up in a great mound of orgasmic earth.
The pitcher's mound is the lightning mound.
Pudge will see fastballs in the wind,
his mescaline arm extends to the field.
He wears his necklace.
He catches the ball in his teeth!
Balls fall with a near thunk
in the upholstery of the leather glove he put on
to caress me, as told to, in the off-season.
All of a sudden he leaps from the couch,
a real ball has come thru the window
& is heading for the penguins on his sweater,
one of whom has lost his balloon
which is floating up into the sky!

That was fun to type up. I like to rewrite poems I love in sketchbook pages, just to see them differently, or to hear them more deliberately, but I don't usually type them up. I like hand-re-writing more, but for the purpose of blogging, that wouldn't quite work, would it?

Hope you enjoyed your baseball poem of the day.