THE LONG FLY

What I still see is Jim Hickman
drifting back in right field, waiting,
sunglasses down over blackened cheekbones,
glove turned and spread, ready.
But the ball does not fall:
the ball rises higher still, disappears
in the endless blue, flies off,
white falcon spiralling up into the sun.

The crowd goes silent, sits down
in confusion, looking at one another--cheers
drifting off like balloons cut loose--
at the empty sky, at Hickman
wandering like a lost child, hat off,
glove dangling from his index finger.
Behind the plate Nestor Shylack
has pulled off mask and blue serge cap alike
and peers with Randy Hundley out to right

Time has stopped; nothing can continue,
for Tony Perez is neither out nor safe:
to be in play, the ball must be,
and be a ball, and not some bird,
some disembodied spirit calling down like
Shelley's skylark over Sheffield Avenue.

This is eternity, this infinity
Where nothing becomes but only is,
while the fielders like shadows
in a dream look skyward and umpires--
the arbiters of order and regularity--
confer, confound, thumb their rule-book
and think to call the game for want of lights,
save that it is but two o'clock,
and the fans silent, and Hickman scratching his head
in the vast empty hour of the right field grass

Reprinted with permission

from A Step in the Dark

Copyright ©

by Stephen C. Behrendt