Some Culture, Mission Baseball Style

Thanks to our very own literary enthusiast Adam Pfahler, here is a poem he found by Bruce Smith from his collection Devotions, on baseball (and maybe some symbolism about other things, but that is for the critics to decide....


Pinetar, a sluice of tobacco, sunflower seeds, and juju.
Lena Blackburne rubbing mud, gum, the glues and salves
for doing things fairly – one out of three
swipes at the ball and a flare to right, a dying quail, a 3-
2 change popped up with a shitfuck, handcuffed, tomahawked
the high hard stuff or took a backwards K when made to look ugly
as we often were:  Humility 3 Arrogance 1 after seven innings. And all
America around is in the sentimental vaudeville.  So not the claims 
of greened paradise and diamonds in the beauty of the sacrifice 
bunt nor the Newtonian symmetries and distances, it was snakes
in the outfield and trances interrupted by the hamstring pill, spit and
chew,
geological time spans between ball one and ball two.  The meditative
silences
likened to prayer were a bus ride where the Latin music blared.
We had a dominant eye.  We had a thought, well, not quite a thought, 
a thought fouled off in the direction of a woman who could hold a 
drink
an oilcan we'd crush like a inside pitch in our dreams.  Fast twitch
muscle and jock itch.  We scratched our names in dirt.

We wiped our hands on shirts.  As much as we wanted to look good,

we were the bullies of our childhood sliding, cleats up a Juan or Bob

with the fury of the psychopath, Ty Cobb (whose mother

blew his fathers head off with a shotgun, so forever playing dead).

I liked best the games no one could see: pepper, shagging flies, BP.

Got picked off first and waited for a ticket home.

Drafted or matriculated?  In a one-run game I missed the cut-off man.

Boys my age were dying in Khe Sanh.