"Who's On First?"

In honor of the arrival of yet another Spring Training in Major League Baseball (Yankees' pitchers and catchers are scheduled to report today at Legends Field in Tampa), here is a poem by Donald Hall called "Ninth Inning," from his series, "Baseball."

P.S. Play close attention to this fifth stanza, which reveals not a little bit about the new poet laureate's thoughts on writing programs (such as the one in which we found ourselves).

(This piece was originally published in AGNI [issue 36], and followed in the full-length book, The Museum of Clear Ideas.)

The Ninth Inning by Donald Hall 1. My dog and I drive five miles every morning to get the newspaper. How else do I find out, when the Sox trade Smoky Joe Wood for Elizabeth Bishop? He needs persistent demonstration of love and approval. He cocks his head making earnest pathetic sounds. Although I praise his nobility of soul, he is inconsolable 2. when I lift my hand from his ear to shift: Even so, after the reading, the stranger nods, simpers, and offers to share his poems with me. Dean Gratt confided, at the annual Death and Retirement Gala: “Professor McCormick has not changed: A Volvo is just a Subaru with tenure.” Catchers grow old catching, which is strange 3. because they squat so much. “The barn is burning, O, the barn is burning on the hill; the cattle low and blunder in their stalls; the horses scream and hurl their burning manes.” Jennifer remains melancholic. Do you start to feel, Kurt, as if you’re getting it? I mean baseball, as in the generations of old players hanging on, the young 4. coming up from Triple A the first of September, sitting on the bench or pinch-running, ready for winter’s snow-plowing and cement-mixing, while older fellows work out in their gyms or cellars, like George “Shotgun’’ Shuba who swung a bat against a tethered ball one thousand times a day, line-drives underneath his suburban ranchhouse. 5. By 2028, when K. C. turned one-hundred, eighty-three percent of American undergraduates majored in creative writing, more folks had MFA’s than VCR’s, and poetry had passed acrylic in the GNP. The NEA offered fellowships for destroying manuscripts and agreeing: “Never 6. to publish anything jagged on the right side of the page, or ever described as ‘prose poems.’” Guerillas armed with Word Perfect holed in abstract redoubts. Chief-of-Staff Vendler mustered security forces (say: Death Squads) while she issued comforting reports nightly on lyric television. Hideous shepherds sing to their flocks 7. under howling houses of the dog. At the Temple Medical Center in New Haven I wait. My mother at eighty-six goes through the Upper and Lower GI again. My mind jangles, thinking of my sick son in New York and his sick one-year-old girl. This afternoon, if the X-rays go all right, I drive back to New Hampshire. 8. In New Hampshire, late August, the leaves turn slowly, like someone working to order—protesting, outraged—and fall as they must do. The pond water stays warm but the campers have departed. By the railroad goldenrod stiffens; asters begin a late pennant drive in front of the barn; pink hollyhocks wilt and sag like teams out of the race. 9. No Red Sox tonight, but on Friday a double-header with the Detroit Tigers, my terrible old team, worse than the Red Sox who beat the Yankees last night while my mother and I watched —the way we listened, fifty years back— sprightly ghosts playing in heavy snow on VHS 30 from Hartford, and the pitcher stared at the batter.