Dreams Should Not Dog Great Center Fielders
who come in from the pasture.
Dreams should be pets gone fat.
In nightmares Mantle is
cramped, broad-shouldered,
in a taxi, hungry
as Mutt, his father,
who pitched his free time
to get Mick a ticket
from the mines.
He’s late for the game, always.
And DiMaggio at the airport,
despite his tall grace,
eyes darting like some terrier’s
as he stands beside his luggage,
glances at his watch;
he is late, as if he’s waited years
to board a flight
that takes him back
to Marilyn.
And Mantle’s dreams
can’t shake the guards.
The announcer says,
“Now batting…number 7”
as Mantle finds a hole
in the fence
but can’t squeeze through.
And DiMaggio
for twenty-one years
sends six red roses
three times a week
to her Hollywood crypt
but they’re a dog’s
nervous patter.
The dreams of the greats should
be tame, trained
to open and close a gate,
with Mantle strolling
his heaven in center;
Monroe on her toes,
smiling, leaning into
The Clipper’s arms,
returning the roses of her
red lips.
first published in Contemporary Michigan Poetry:
Poems from the Third Coast, edited by Michael Delp,
Conrad Hilberry and Herbert Scott and published by
Wayne State University Press, 1988.
JIM BOUTON, UNWRITING
“You’ve done the game a great disservice…
What can you be thinking of?”
–Commissioner Bowie Kuhn
The gall it took
to drill that peephole you called Ball Four
like those that players bore
into hotel rooms,
when they zoomed in
on the secret lives of skin.
You wrote about the Mick
shoving kids aside, pushing
through them like turnstiles;
Maris flicking off the fans
in Tiger Stadium; in my dark dreams
I was one of them.
Yet I sensed
that the stars were human
long before you wagged your tales.
Your cap flying off,
you’d stoop to the level
of a laborer, the cap a great leveler,
even as you won twenty.
You never out-hurled sweat,
even when your fastball,
the best Mantle ever saw,
was the high priest
that annulled the marriage
between bat and ball,
your cap never sealing
in an era when Yankee heads—
after the strikeout pitch—
produced a pleasing blip
in sync with Mason lids, as the ball
burned its way around the horn.
And if your thoughts ran bitter
after your sore arm
as your teammates said,
that would not have been surprising
to a kid who saw
your cap falling,
falling until
I could not be further deceived
by uniforms that were sleeveless
in the snowy field of a TV screen,
not believe the players
mouthed mothballs between games,
that street clothes
were a strange bacteria
that would have killed.
But lately I note
how you survived for a second lifetime
eight long years after being released,
how crossbones and skull
stamped your knuckleball
despite the Dodgers’ ridicule
as they gnashed
and struck out.
When I think about you
inventing vanity baseball cars—
four perfect corners
adorning even the most insufferable
bench-warmers moving slow—
creating Big League Chew,
where gum bubbles mimic
a sweet-breathed world
we knew long ago,
I know that you are unwriting
Ball Four, unwittingly
restoring each myth,
even now as you pitch, at 51,
for the Little Ferry Giants, semi-pros.
Now Mantle, too, grows
into the gee-whiz sort
he portrayed on Home Run Derby
thirty years before,
no longer sullen
but at ease during shows, his head
floating among memorabilia.
And your old fastball
I see again, even briefer than before,
so that in one cosmotellurian leap
there is no space
between the mound and the plate:
your mitt and the catcher’s
one and the same.
Though your buzzing butch
still stings the memory,
your cap falling off
no longer signals that by game’s end
the Yankees are flying from
between their buttons,
brushing by their fans—you unwriting
so that behind their pinstripes,
those taut, blue bars,
the Yankee greats,
though they be tortured
are again model prisoners.
first published in The New York Quarterly, Number 53
DON LARSEN’S PERFECT WORLD SERIES GAME
Yankee Stadium,
October 8, 1956
Despite the fall, Eden buzzed
in one crowded brain cell.
In this big fifth game against the Dodgers,
Larsen, whose best pitch was to the girl
at the bar, stepped toward the mound,
anxious to atone for his Brooklyn start,
hoping his mom in San Diego would watch
when he unwittingly heard God’s warning:
“In the garden eat any fruit, but not
from the tree of evil and good.”
Then he who broke curfew,
whose car once lost it at 5 AM
and wrapped around a telephone pole,
he who’d eaten from the wrong tree,
turned over control.
Though throngs circled him and teammates
smacked their gloves, God said,
“It isn’t right for Don to be alone,”
and then put big Don Larsen to sleep
before the first pitch.
Then God reached into him for a rib
and formed a sweeping curve
to make his change of pace tail away.
And this was more than Larsen gave his wife
who filed this day to have his share
attached by the court, and with a snort
Larsen faced the mighty trees
of the Dodger bats, to avoid them like alimony.
For the Yanks Mantle homered, ran down
Hodges’ drive. In mid game, perfection remiss,
Larsen felt pressure and a snake hissed
in every swing: “Larsen, give in.
Be the uneven pitcher you’ve always been.”
How lovely and fresh a base hit would look.
And Larsen, nervous, toed the rubber
and felt it nub up in his legs till he
almost fell. But through the crowd
he heard the river of Eden roar.
And in the ninth, Furillo flied to the wall
in right, and Larsen gazed toward
the garden’s age, amazed at the leeway
within perfection, his pitches naked and unashamed
and Campanella bounced to second.
Then Mitchell, the pinch hitter,
sidled up, sweet hits clustered on his bat,
and the serpent bobbed: Eat the fruit
of the base hit. Impeccability God bears not
in anyone but himself.
Eat before the Lord intervenes.”
“Help me out, Somebody,” Larsen moaned,
and two strikes branded Berra’s mitt.
Then Mitchell fouled one off the crowd’s roar.
“Here goes nothing!” Larsen sighed
and God, lonely for perfection,
looked no deeper than Larsen’s words.
“Nothing it is!” God’s voice rolled
and no ball was thrown, though Mitchell
saw a fastball, outside and low,
and the umpire a third strike
and Berra a mystery hard and white,
and with a leap Berra landed
in Larsen’s arms and the crowd cheered
and cheered for their own lives,
and headed out the garden gate,
everyone feeling perfectly fine.
first published in Contemporary Michigan Poetry:
Poems from the Third Coast, edited by Michael Delp,
Conrad Hilberry and Herbert Scott and published by
Wayne State University Press, 1988.
AT PENN STATION THE TEAM BOARDS THE YANKEE SPECIAL
Behind it the grinning steel
of the Iron City Flier, its companion train.
Inside them it is bright
as if all light were born there.
Outside, derbies and soft hats
float on a dour fog,
which seems to split at the blast
of a whistle, leaving a space
down a stairway for Gehrig,
who says, “Hiya, kids,
I bet you fellahs are ballplayers.”
From high in the concourse
brilliant wings of window light
broadcast the Yankees’ luggage
onto the street below. A train spotter,
pleasantly distracted, feels
the moment is ripe
for Ruth to appear. Lazzeri spits,
“Last I saw, he gave the eye
to some gal, and she kep’ it.
Extending out of his crouch,
catcher Bill Dickey halts,
arches his back—long suspenders flex,
this night smitten with heroes:
the gum-chewing Benny Benbough,
Waite Hoyt and George Pipgras,
Wilcy Moore, then Cedric Durst.
And now the great Babe himself,
talking his moon face around,
brags he’s gonna bang
a few down in Boston,
his size increased by half
as he gives himself away in autographs,
then onto the train,
claims a seat by the door, embarrasses Pennock
when he booms, “Piss pass a cigar!”
while outside the train
a reporter in a bright bow tie
wonders how a thin green curtain
across his lower berth
can keep Babe’s belly laugh from
shaking loose his car, hurtling it skyward
at the mercy of the stars.
first published in The Ripening of Pinstripes:
Called Shots on the New York Yankees,
published by Story Line Press, 1998.
