by Ron McFarland
Working my hand into one of those stiff
four-fingered gloves designed for
second basemen, I wonder why
even before the strike, so many people
turned against baseball,
favoring the quick kill,
raw meat, cracked bones, and twisted ligaments
of football.
We have become impatient.
We have lost our enthusiasm
for the subtle, the elusive,
the comfort of peanuts and
sunflower seeds and the sweet boredom
of a summer afternoon.
When I was about eight
my brother had a glove like this, a glove
that seemed to harden
in the sun.
Nothing could break it in, and when one
golden afternoon he left it stranded on second,
it never returned,
but he came back a few years down the road
unscathed from Vietnam with a story of how he was
left on second with two out and the score tied
when the mortars fell on Pleiku.
Another brother I know of
apparently tried to field a Cong grenade,
maybe a basket catch like Willie Mays.
But I don’t know how much he loved the game.
Gloves like this one hold the hand steady,
as if Rogers Hornsby himself were
holding your hand firmly in the dirt
for a hot grounder years before the war.
With an old glove like this and a new baseball,
you could start the whole world over.
Ron McFarland is professor emeritus in the MFA program at the University of Idaho.
