An Inning on the Human Condition [as Spoken by Players on A Baseball Field]
Pitcher: All things have a source:
the cold water of the Mississippi
begins quietly under the pines and birch
where a small stream speaks
its first words: Rock. Cloud.
Home: And all things are received,
sometimes as river mud.
Gulls leave the heads of small fish
to rot on the banks, rimy, and foul.
Pitcher: Slowly, a river gathers itself, and gathers
movement in its blue belly: currents,
submerged life. Nightmares well up.
Home: And at the delta, the silt swings wide
into the ocean, cerulean and sapphire
fanning out. Its power grounds us.
First Base: Perception arrives. It stays put
for a moment, but it’s restless, like
sunlight on the ocean. It’s ready to shift.
Pitcher: Let’s say that a woman loves her daughter.
The love is fast, and searing.
Home: Contact. She becomes double-hearted.
First Base: First inside her body, and then without,
when she becomes two. Let’s say that
on hot summer days, the woman
watches her daughter run
Third Base: to the edge of the river, and stop
just short of the unfathomable water.
Pitcher: As her child flirts with grey surf,
small feet kissing and kissing the mud,
the woman could drown
in her own love and terror.
Home: It’s difficult to articulate
Shortstop: the pleasures of tossing
a stone into the water. Of feeling its loss,
suddenly gone from the hand,
of throwing its heaviness
Second Base: Out.
Pitcher: We sustain the battery.
Home: We hold our positions relative to one another.
Second Base: We are doubled by our strangeness
Home: and return to ourselves.
Pitcher: What is it about the tern, and gull
and loon and lapping water
Home: in which we hear human voices,
always elsewhere?
Right fielder: Rare, the rightness of
knowing oneself. Sweet catch.
Pitcher: Among us, fluid, we shape ourselves
Home: in a desire to speak about
Center
Fielder: a depth of field too difficult
to understand, almost beyond bounds:
Shortstop: the shape of our own errors,
Home: the shape of ecstasy,
First: the shape of near misses, wild swings,
Second: wicked love,
Third: leaving empty-handed, played out, and always…
Outfielders: SLIDE!
Third base
and Home: …always …
All other
players: SLIDE!
Third base: …always, bruised and blessed and breathless,
Home: arrive at something we call home.
Anna George Meek has published in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, and many others. 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.