CHATTER
I did the Saturday puzzle on Sunday and
the Sunday puzzle on Saturday and I
watched a thousand hours of cops and robbers
when my friend assigned me the task of writing
a baseball poem, since right now there is no
baseball except in memory so I thought of
the Miracle Mets and then the Boys of Summer
but they both seemed frayed from overuse and I
began to think of the teams of my boyhood, call them
the Boys of Early Spring – Eddie Stanky and Pete Reiser
and Cookie Lavagetto, Kirby Higbe and Ed Head and that perfect
baseball name, Dixie Walker, brother to Harry the Hat Walker,
and remembered more as a bigot who wouldn’t play with Jackie Robinson
than as an outfielder, but I didn’t know that when I was
ten and we had the only television set at 946 Bushwick Avenue
and I watched the games by myself with a bag of candy corn
the cheapest loose candy Woolworth’s sold, assuming
the Dodgers and I would grow old together (twelve, fourteen, beyond)
and wondering why all baseball announcers had Southern accents
and now the rich players and the even richer owners have finally
decided to play some baseball and I guess I’ll slump down and
stare at the games, by myself again, but without candy corn