by Donald Hall
When the tall puffy
Figure wearing number
nine starts
late for the fly ball,
laboring forward
like a lame truckhorse
startled by a gartersnake,
–this old fellow
whose body we remember
as sleek and nervous as a filly’s–
and barely catches it
in his glove’s
tip, we rise and applaud weeping:
On a green field we observe the ruin
of even the bravest
body, as Odysseus
wept to glimpse
among the shades the shadow
of Achilles.
Donald Hall, who died on Sunday at age 89, was a writer, editor, literary critic and U.S. Poet Laureate in 2006.