I lost my father in April 1998, & there's not a day goes by that I don't think of him in one way or another.
Never having become a father myself, I never gave him the grandchildren he wanted so much. (My brother managed that.) What you will find on the flip (some years in the making) is about all I could give him, in the end. I don't think it's quite in final form, but finished enough to share today.
If you're a member of the vast minority not allergic to poetry--or to baseball--there's a ticket being held in your username at the Will-Call window down below the fold--
A HIGHER LEAGUE
for my father, 1913-1998
He plays third base like he came down from a higher league.
MLB umpire Ed Hurley describing Brooks Robinson
In the last homestand
of a long-lived season,
the shadows of the grandstands
stretched toward my father
where he sprawled stunned
in the ICU, time called
after the high hard one
that stopped his heart.
Each day when we arrived
he gripped our hands
as if reaching back
across eighty years
of Little League coaching,
fatherhood and factory,
Okinawa, Leyte,
marriage, the coal mine
where he worked the tipple
safe above ground
and wore white flannels,
the sure-handed shortstop
of the company team--
back to an uneven diamond
laid out in burlap bags
in some farm’s back acres
south of Uniontown,
back to the first taped ball
caught in a boy’s bare hands,
the first curl of fingers
around a bat handle.
Through seven weeks, whatever
the gathering dark threw him
he kept getting a piece of,
spoiling those third strikes,
patient perhaps for a chance
to turn on one, and launch
one last long drive
against the dwindling light
and touch them all once more
before the call came down
to join the souls assembling
in some ghostly league.
As parent clubs broke camp
and flew north for the openers,
before the breathing tube
forced out his voice,
he drew us near
and rasped a last request:
Don’t let them send me down
Into the cold, cold ground.
Two weeks into the season
we laid his body out
in the funeral home
in a combustible casket,
suited up once more
in his best pinstripes
and a pearl stickpin
for the tie our mother had made,
and left on the coffin lip
next to his throwing arm
a brand-new baseball, taut
and tight as a slider’s spin,
bright as the season’s end
each player dreams each April.
One by one the home team
and the visiting roster
took up a ballpoint
to fill a blank space,
We'll miss you scrawled
within each autograph.
When time came to close
the lid, I slipped the pin
from his tie into my own
sewn from the same bolt,
and nested the ball into
the padding by his shoulder,
last out of the last inning
of his long campaign,
a shape for memories
we would all grip for comfort
as the best part of him
rose up in the flames
called up at long last
to a higher league.
My brother held the ashes
for a year safe at home,
trying to dream the right field
to scatter them across;
but our mother, undaunted
by the dark and cold,
wanted what remained
to rest where she could join him
when her time came;
so come the next April,
we laid the box at last
in the veterans’ graveyard,
under a stone plaque
no bigger than home plate,
carved with no more
than name, rank and war.
Every April since
we carry her back to him,
bringing pennants of flowers
grown in the home garden
she still tends by herself,
keeping them refreshed
like a faithful fan
through autumn’s last innings,
even as the shadows
lengthen and the light
begins to falter
in her own eyes--
Yet the best part of him
is sown through the stadium
of air, atom by atom,
we take in with each breath
and make part of the blood
and spin free again
as the sun lifts in its daily
parabola, launched
perfect as a pearl
high over the diamond
as the crowd comes to its feet
in a single shout,
soaring over the fence,
the outfielders’ gloves
waving farewell:
a walk-off four-bagger.
Touch ‘em all, old timer,
the way you always did,
the way you always will,
heading home forever
in a higher league.