Loving My Father Loving Baseball

Asthmatic, my father couldn’t run
the length of the yard, spent his boyhood
winning breath from an oxygen tent.

He learned, instead, to read whole stories 
from statistics in the Baseball Almanac: 
shutouts, short seasons, sacrifice hits.  
He imagined grass, and air, chalk lines 
and dust, how Hank Greenberg came back
from war and led the Tigers to a World Series 
victory. In my father’s mind, 
a theater of healthy men.

I learned to cheer for Johnny Bench 
before the great man survived baseball
to sell cans of spray paint, and we forgave him, 
a little.  Of course, the body fails; 
when his plane was shot down in 1944,
outfielder Elmer Gedeon never came home 
to the Washington Senators. “Today,”
said Lou Gehrig, “I consider myself 
the luckiest man alive.” And my father wept.

My heart brings Dad to every game 
at this outdoor park he never saw.
But I don’t want to pronounce baseball 
a game of ghosts. This evening, the Twins
swing at nothing, again and again, 
and we cheer them on anyway; at my side, 
my little daughter leaps to her feet, 
shouting, short of breath, cheering for her life.

When Dad died, we buried his ashes 
with Hank Greenberg’s rookie card.  
Luck of mind, and love: we consider ourselves
giants, and tigers, and pirates, and mariners;
here, we are more than our bodies, and even losing,
I’m so happy I could cry.

Anna George Meek has published in dozens of national journals such as Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and The Yale Review. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and two Minnesota State Arts Board grants. Her work has appeared on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac and has been selected multiple times for both Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Her first book, Acts of Contortion, won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry; her chapbook Engraved won the Snowbound Chapbook Competition. Her second full-length book The Genome Rhapsodies won the Richard Snyder Prize from Ashland Press. Meek lives with her husband and daughter where she sings professionally, is a professor of English in the Twin Cities, and has season tickets to the Twins.