|
Bob Hicok
Root root root for the home team
They spit too much in baseball, I can’t watch,
I don’t like spitting, we should be elegant,
sling garbage in suits, not throw balls
at each other’s heads and spit, not slide
spikes high and spit, are these men drowning?,
what’s the rule when you need both a question mark
and a comma after a sentence?, should I spit now
that I’ve asked?, are you spitting on you way out
to pick the kids up from skating?, my allegiance
is to the grass, spit on in front of sixty-thousand people,
such a beautiful translation of sun, everything I want
from plant life, to be the bed of summer sleep,
to be soft in catching my stumbles, labor is weak,
on the defensive, I say we lead grass in a strike,
No More Spitting on some of the signs we’ll carry,
High and Dry also drives the point home, look, a pun,
but you don’t see me spitting now, do you?, or after metaphors
spitting, God help us if poets spit after alliterating,
I never tried that word as a verb, give it a shot,
it’s like a line drive in your mouth, let’s celebrate,
I’ve got sparklers, we can burn things, we’ll keep our fluids
to ourselves, this is what civilized people do, and art,
the do that too, make walls and then make walls prettier,
I bet Picasso was a big spitter, you had to watch
where you stepped during his blue period, Van Gogh
never spit, not ever once in his life, but if he did
it would have been in a lively, shimmery, I-am-going-mad
sort of way, there he is, stretching a single into a double,
looking at the second baseman’s head, noticing how it moves,
how the colors are breakers of light, the score
is Yankees twelve, Painters yellow, what could be more American
than the stolen base?
BOB HICOK lives on the nude beach of his mind.
“Root root root for the home team” appears in our Spring
2007 issue.
|
