The Baseball Poem

A wrist (to repeat

with a shift

ofac-

cent, mood, of emphasis

attentive to) now

needed

The wrist I lost

hold of, of

what was most

loved as a kid

in the swing of

Ted Williams,

the effortlessly

breaking as

of the curved

way true to the

mark, of the stuff of Prince

Hal,

the poem ought to be,

as love is

a style she holds

out to me

to perch on the pulse of,

aristo-

cratically, as I am not so but can

at will flop for,

sloppily,

to please the crowd

For the game (the

jugglery,

evasion

that's the invasion of

privacy in, say

(yes,

say it, him, and by

all means

empathetically)

Charlie Chaplin)

is as it must be

drawing

to the close of its

night now,

one is 30,

having learned control,

how to pick the spots,

and sits

high up in the tiers

instead of

the lobsterbacked

bleachers faraway close,

and knows no wrist of a

rare kid's form

will bring down

that bird with the sun in its beak to break all records.