Baseball

The game is on. My daughter, a recent pilgrim to this earth,
sits in the corner of her universe with her toys, oblivious
to the sounds issuing from the TV: stats, conditioner, steroids,
blood. Engrossed and sinking the couch envelopes me.
Athletes unfold

their physics behind a clear viewing glass, a living relic,
that I and others rarely kneel to observe anymore
but it holds my gaze, for now. In the background
god-like majesty drapes pour down the stadium in waves.
She pretends to be a fish.

When I was young I worshiped the game for the praise
it brought me for catching a ball or swinging a bat, while Frost
was out swinging birches; the volume of a city turned down.
She feels something cold.

The play continues on a diamond of no value,
except for those architects who shape it, keep it dry:
geometers of symmetry and chaos-destroyers.
She stacks rings around a peg.

Someone hits a line drive. Someone runs home.
Now, I see my daughter

eyeing a baseball on the floor across the room,
too big for her small hands and there are no chalk lines
to guide her there. No umpires. No stadium around her.
How she bends and folds

down to the ball. How she lifts the now holy object.
What love! What great caution! She tends
to its tracing seems, like pathways on a small
and disappearing world. Even touching her lips

to the leather sphere. Even meeting it with her tongue!
She caries the ball to me as if she has just emerged
from the depths of an ocean or some other galaxy
that is like an ocean with a pearl or planet

fixed in the space before her, priest-like she floats
towards me and she lets this precious pearl of a world
fall into my hands and she wants me to play.
The game is on.