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.