Baseball
Baseball is the father I wish I had
Me, a boy of Summer and Spring
Like the almighty Casey with his bat
Swinging and missing a cloth-less fastball for strike three
The way he only saw me three times in my life
Him abandoning me and my mother when I was eight
That father hole as mammoth as the heroical soul of Hank Aaron
Fatherlessness filled by those days
I religiously bounced a pink sponge ball off a building wall
Playing catch with myself
Or taking hard swipes like Casey
At balls thrown by no one at all
My ma never played games
Left that to her only child
As she scrunched and conformed
Her body into intentional walks
And brutal hits by wild pitches
hurled at poor brown women
So that she and I would not die before we scored one lonely run
And other than my single mother and welfare and food stamps
Baseball drafted and dragged me into manhood
By the spiked cleats of my Ty Cobb rage
It grew me past white milk dabbed across my top lip
Past the nasty disses of my pleather second baseman’s glove
Past my closest cousin’s hook slide around our blood and flesh
Past Hemingway’s old man and sea tailing a fish and Joltin’ Joe
Baseball schooled me on how to bubble-gum my selfie
In the prickly splinters of busted fences
Like August Wilson’s Troy Maxson
His life a soiled, raggedy globe with the stitches come a-loose
Hanging from a rope hanging from a tree
Hanging him hanging me
If I forget my birthright of stolen bases and stolen geographies
If I don’t understand
Better to have no daddy
Than to have a punch-drunk one pinch-hit for an absent one
If I don’t understand that Willie Mays
Sprinted like he was speed-racing the Underground Railroad
Because he was
The wind ripping that cap from his head
His back to the world like Miles Davis’
As he caught freedom in his outstretched mitt
Whirled ‘round like a
Shot putter in the Olympics
And flung freedom to his momma and them
In a cotton field of dreams
I want to be Willie Mays
The say hey kid with the coolest swag
I want to be Ken Griffey, Jr.
The boom-bap kid with the coolest swag
Because baseball teaches you
To dive fingertips first into tomorrow
like Ichiro and Fernando Tatis, Jr.
Teaches you to chant praise songs for history and math
Teaches you to collect and tuck yourself into shoeboxes
Teaches you what not to do with a bat
Like that day Columbus clubbed Kojo
Over the head with a Louisville slugger
The lump in the centerfield of Kojo’s brain
as towering as the Empire State
Because Columbus’ hands were not splendid enough
To make his point plain
Kojo was never the same
After that day he plopped to the earth like a badly missed fly ball
And my folding bed and I brawled for weeks in blank horror
At how my beloved baseball
Could be double played instantly
Like Tinkers to Evers to Chance
By hate and trauma
As in the afternoon I went outside
in my new White neighborhood
to freestyle stickball with the boys
on the block and one of the White
Dudes, a sour-mouthed red-head, insisted on referring to me
as “the n_____” until I chased
him with our stickball bat
from sewer to fire hydrant to the door
of his crib as he crouched like a catcher behind
his mother who swore he meant
no harm whatsoever
Nope, he never called me that word again
But in that moment, I was Jackie Robinson
Bug-spraying my eyes against slavery and segregation
As I baited and bounced like Sammy Davis, Jr. on third base
Then I projected myself, as a nuclear missile, toward home plate
Surgically ahead of Yogi Berra’s tag
Jackie was not merely stealing a base
But he was also retracing and reclaiming
The tie-dye teardrops of an Orisha
The ancestral blue door of no return
The antique store memories in Blackface
One basepath at a time
Not knowing that breathing as a Negro in a league of his own would
age and hock-spit him down as it would me years later
God bless you, please, Mrs. Jackie Robinson
Heaven keeps a space for those who slay
Yea, yea, yea—
Yea, yea, yea—
Is that why they evermore photoshop Curt Flood
from the same Mount Rushmore that showcases
racists and drug addicts and
alcoholics and adulterers and cheaters?
Is that Branch Rickey and Curt Flood and Roberto Clemente
I see high five-ing their lives away to spare humankind?
Did Curt Flood’s whistle during just a friendly game of baseball
render him the Emmett Till of American sports?
Is this why I can scarcely find boys like me
playing baseball anymore?
Yes, baseball has both healed and bruised me
It has gnarled fingers
dislocated shoulders
permanently scarred knees
I have methodically devoured victory
as if it is my ma’s sweet potato pie
I have methodically vomited defeat
as if it is artificial turf in my vegan-buttered popcorn
Baseball is love, is the first great love of my life
My beautiful and bewildering New York Yankees
The concrete paradise in The South Bronx
The uptown funk that the Jazz Age built
When Irish Jewish Italian African American
Puerto Rican West Indian Dominican
Unbraided boy stories the way we traded baseball cards as youth
Digitizing the decades while beat-boxing
the blues, bebop, boogaloo, and Black and Boricua soul:
I am Babe Ruth
A sultan swatting the moon and Mars like they are country-flies
I am Lou Gehrig
An iron horse hobbling hearts with a naked self-eulogy
I am Joe DiMaggio
A quietly regal clipper carving number 56 into baseball’s ozone
I am Mickey Mantle
An Oklahoma comet consecrating dust with the swiftest of feet
I am Reggie Jackson
An October Picasso brush-stroking eternity with a simple bat toss
I am Rickey Henderson
A prophet with legs of steel scaling horizons like Baryshnikov
I am Derek Jeter
A private super-man confounding doom with the flip of a wrist
I am Aaron Judge
A hip-hop Paul Bunyan hailing launch angles like the gods themselves
Their seventh inning stretch
Be my Geechee grandma’s roots conjuring
Me up from boyhood poverty to attend
My earliest Yankee games
As a grown-up shoulder-to-shoulder with the
eight-year-old me in utter wonderment
Their seventh inning stretch
Be my Geechee grandma’s roots conjuring
Me up from the Jim Crow dugout
Of Josh Gibson and “Cool Papa” Bell and Satchel Paige
As they serenade America with
“Take Me Out to the Ball Game”
a sing-along as joyful as a Mudville sweaty palm
Gently patting my cheek when I
Proclaimed to the maddened thousands
I would be a big leaguer one day
No, I cannot dream of a world without our national pastime
Yes, baseball is the perfectly imperfect
father I wish I had
And I will
forever be that kid in love with
the sport that saved my life