The Meaning of Baseball

This is from Max Garland's book The Postal Confessions.

Max Garland

We sit on the bench like shy freight,

like timid whippersnapers. One by one

are called forward, our names barked

into the air. We swing

before the ball even leaves the coach’s hand,

swing when it’s halfway home, swing

as it rolls past the catcher,

crawls to a stop like a bug in the dust.

We try techniques of our own invention,

throwing the bat at the ball,

the bat spinning like a fan blade,

the poor man, someone’s father,

flattened on the mound.

Sometimes it’s ourselves we hit

as the bat comes awkwardly around,

our faces winding into tiny knots

of unfallen tears. Occasionally,

eventually, there is the wooden sound

of impact, like an accident.

The ball dribbles forth, or even flies.

And the feeling is exactly

what we feel years later

the first time the heart misfires,

sputters a few beats, then rights

itself. In other words,

the empty space inside the body.

Summer moves along. Some of us outshine

the others, the wheat separated

rather bluntly from the chaff.

Grounders thump against our chests,

fly balls descend upon us

like strangers we’ve been warned against.

We’ve been in school enough to know

the rising moon above the field

is a ball, the earth is a ball,

the seasons themselves, a kind of ball.

One night, standing under the lights,

we suddenly know exactly what will happen.

For no reason on earth, lean left,

take three quick steps and begin to run

as if from something faceless in a dream.

Someone yells back, some stop.

The voices register, but fail to matter

(wheat from the chaff) for we have discovered

the tiny scale of destiny. The ball is a smudge,

a shadow, something floating under the eyelids.

We are heading for a place the night

itself has decided. Our legs pump,

a hand shoots out, the ball hangs

in the thinnest part of the webbing.

Roberto, someone screams from the stands,

meaning Clemente, the greatest

and strangest player of our day.

Later, much older, we’ll spend hours

on bleachers, reading papers,

in front of televisions, not knowing

we are looking for this moment,

which for reasons of physics alone,

can never return. Though it will occur to us

at times—opening an envelope, lifting a couch,

or just before the anesthetic takes hold,

that there is a net below our lives,

that we can know what will happen,

the way a circle is foretold

by the first few degrees of an arc,

that knowledge can break our fall.

Though it may not be true, of course,

it is the meaning of baseball,

as taught to us as children,

as we open our envelope, as we lift

our couch, as we lie on our gurney

counting backwards from ten.