Baseball on a Threatening School Day
photo by Tony Wallin-Sato
by Ken Been
I write water
Across a worksheet sky
As if its pale color could hold fast
And not rain out
Baseball
The secrets of Little League kids
Revealed in the vocabulary lessons of the clouds on our desks
Nimbus words and definitions
Supposedly matching up
With my pencil line
Dragged
Between them
As the suspense of the window sky squeezes into Room 10.
There is no light passing through the afternoon
And I’m called upon
To raise my hand higher than theirs
Up over the outfield fence
Up, way up, into the troposphere where we we’d play on cirrus fields
The world in baggy shapes of game day parades
Floating along Main Street toward the park
Where a man at the plate in a white, wrinkly shirt
Divides the clouds with the wingspan of his arms
And it rains.
I turn in my assignments
And we run
Our daydreams pouring into the game holes we’ve left in the dirt,
An infield moon mixing up with the stick mud of April
By the green bench along the first baseline where we’d sit
Waiting for winds and clearings in the sky,
For words, for meanings to be used in sentences,
The innings silently narrated in each of us-
Homework at the kitchen table
Cleats on the rug by the door.
Ken Been’s poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. A sampling includes Stone Poetry Quarterly, October Hill Magazine, Arlington Literary Journal, The Headlight Review, Kestrel, Plainsongs, Poetica Magazine and Remembering Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He is from Detroit, which – in a quirk of geography – is north of its border with Canada.
Tony Wallin-Sato is a Japanese American who works with formerly/currently incarcerated individuals in higher education as the Program Director for Project Rebound at Cal Poly Humboldt and is a lecturer in the critical race gender and sexuality studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt. He holds an MFA in Poetry and is the Co-Chair for the Boundless Freedom Project and an Advisory Board Member for the American Prison Newspaper Project.
