The Angel Of Losing
Her enormous wings cover us all
when she drifts in over the baseball field
like a storm cloud. She means well, comes often;
this year she has a crush on the pitching staff.
Clumsy-hearted, she kisses their elbows
which begin to ache with her affections.
We resign ourselves to her love around the 6th or 7th inning.
Going home, we are heavier by a grey feather or two.
She’s with us before sleep when we watch the ordinary ceiling
and are forced to consider our relationship
to mediocrity, bad seasons in ball and love,
good ideas that slip through our hands.
We might replay our mistakes,
though that’s not the angel’s fault. Really,
she’s a fine angel with her own dignity.
Of course, we’re waiting
for the moment her invisible hem flutters on
to grace a different ball club,
but before then, the pitcher and the catcher
gather on the mound, and thousands imagine
with excitement their stern or wise words.
What could they have to tell us
about hanging in, or walking away,
or whether or not it’s just a game? The angel of losing
smiles on us so that we may feel more vividly
the simple force of possibility: the batter, for example,
who steps to the plate. Then
before the ball smacks the mitt
that the catcher has opened to receive it,
how spectacular the empty swing.
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.