Bardball

by Wyatt Prunty

About the time I got my first-baseman’s mitt
I heard that Dizzy Dean was sacked
Because he made a dirty comment
Over the air. Camera zoomed and locked
On a young couple kissing, something slipped
With Dizzy, who then made the call:
“He kisses her on every strike,
And she kisses him on the balls.”

In a century banked with guilt and doubt
Sometimes the telling moments come
As inadvertently as Dizzy’s joke,
Like Hitler’s code before Coventry was bombed,
Or Valéry’s remark about Descartes:
“I sometimes think, therefore sometimes I am.”

Wyatt Prunty is the author of nine collections of poetry and served as editor of the essay collection Sewanee Writers on Writing. He has taught at The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, Louisiana State University, Washington and Lee University, and Sewanee, where he is presently the Ogden P. Carlton Professor of Literature. He is a recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Johns Hopkins and Brown Foundation fellowships.