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Bennett Paris
Playing Softball Blind
She grips the bat cautiously,
and with her instructor's help,
approaches the ball on the T-stand;
beep, beep, beep.
Her tentative smile,
arguably the reason we're alive,
is a home run.
A brilliant Sunday morning in the park,
on an adjacent field,
another ugly mens' softball loss;
beep, beep, beep.
An easy grounder to the third baseman, booted.
He throws a tantrum straight from childhood;
beep, beep, beep.
At bat the next inning,
he shouts at the blind players' field;
beep, beep, beep.
"Will someone please turn
that fucking thing off!"
Beep, beep, beep.
Pop-fly
The snap and pop of softballs tossed,
then whipped, from glove to glove
(idle warm-ups, idle talk, idle play)
would be useless if play were not life
and if life were not play.
Like children and young animals,
(unaware that play is the purest sign of well-being)
we push ourselves to the limits our age allows.
It's nine o'clock, Sunday morning; we ought to be home:
a different kind of idle talk; coffee, newspaper, bathroom.
We try our best; win, lose, bicker,
fight sometimes. We hit into double-plays;
bounce singles up the middle,
throw out runners from the outfield,
and we drop easy pop-flies behind the bag at third.
We retreat, sore from sprinting,
knees scraped on the infield dirt at Heckscher Field.
We try to remember games in which we've played well,
made a play in the field, or driven in the winning run.
But the dropped pop-fly plays itself over and over again.
There's a hammock in the backyard, shade, the Sunday Times.
We lost and she loves me just the same; trite but true.
These dropped pop-flies, this living as a sequence of mistakes, losses,
and redoubling, we keep trying to remember,
this and this alone, makes us what we are.
Softball and the War
Trees surround the field,
and hills surround the trees.
This is our game, today is our day.
We agree to ignore
the dying and the maimed.
We're up. They're up. We're up again.
The cut and groomed field is a reflection
of our lives: angled, ordered, green.
The absence of a clock allows us to insist
that things are still the same.
We cheer, we root.
We chase the win with a purpose we reserve
for our most serious pursuits.
(A dive in the left-center gap, a collision at home.)
Just beyond the hills bombs are falling in the woods.
The maimed stumble over to watch us play.
Today is our day, this is our game;
high-fives, fist-taps, way to go;
a normal game of baseball,
on a normal day.
©2006 by Bennett Paris
Bennett Paris's hammock hangs in Jersey City and in Salvador da Bahia,
Brazil.
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