The Art of Shortstop
Ozzie Smith times his leap, makes the catch at the top of his glove. My father says ice cream cone—a vanilla scoop of baseball above the leather, my first metaphor. I see it clearly, unlike the line drive soaring toward me at practice the next day. I want to replicate the grace of Ozzie Smith, but I’m ten years old, my new glove hangs stiff and heavy on my useless hand. I don’t completely lose consciousness, but I taste blood. Coach checks my teeth and says, That was some rocket. Let’s try second base next time. I nod. Second base, a safer place to suffer the busted lip of metaphor.
***
Deed
It’s not go golfing, it’s play golf, Mrs. Perkins says, always correcting our grammar, even when agreeing to meet us at Keeney Park. It’s the nicest thing we’ve ever done, me and Eric, asking our English teacher to play golf the summer after graduation. She’s been at our high school for like forever, back when women were Mrs. She’s tiny, she limps, she drives the ball 100 yards down the middle, pokes the next shot 100 yards, et. cetera, et. cetera, two-putts every green. Me and Eric, we hack it all over the place—hook in the woods, slice in the water—while there goes Mrs. Perkins in her orange visor, pulling her cart up and down the hills, hobbling in front of it like a determined old mule. Some of our friends make fun of her, limp behind her down the hallway. Me and Eric, we never say anything, except maybe we laugh a little. Over dollar beers at The Beacon that night we tell everyone we played golf with Mrs. Perkins. Yes, Mrs. Perkins, who probably knows grammar and golf aren’t the only wayward things about us.
***
Passion Ploy
It feels good to exclaim. Sure, it looks like a crutch—!—but so what? Use them sparingly, the last rule I struck. Speaking of, we had three kinds of bowling alleys in New England: ten-pin, duckpin, candlepin. Thwack! Thwock! All that deadwood swept away for the sake of decorum. Propriety, sobriety, but never enough oil on the lanes.
***
My Papers
They’ll never find my papers, not that anyone
will ever look, unless I suddenly become famous,
maybe a lightning strike rewiring my dendrites
so that I think only in rhyme or 5/4 time,
some quirky spumescence similar to adolescence
when I’d covertly unfurl the top-shelved centerfolds
as the Italian barbers snipped to opera, the skin art
mysterious as the arias blaring from the Magnavox
and far more tantalizing than this origami
swan of nostalgia I can’t seem to complete,
words skittering like ants across linoleum,
experimental lines intended to be read up and down
or east to west, a poem without a GPS that recalls
my mother trying to fold maps on family trips,
finally crumpling the highways into a ball
and stuffing them in the glove compartment,
JesusMaryandJoseph. No, no rough drafts,
no correspondence with editors, no juvenilia
or marginalia or love letters. What constitutes
my papers are stored in Tupperware somewhere
in the basement: baseball cards from the sixties
and seventies, worn, torn, rubber-banded stacks
of crackerjack players scowling for the camera
but laughing on the inside, or so I want to believe,
all-stars and backups who drove trucks
and mined coal in the off-season to make ends meet,
grown children just happy to be playing a game,
catching a can of corn for a bag of peanuts.
***
Survival Floating
In the chlorinated womb
of an indoor pool,
our first lesson:
faces down, backs stiff,
we rise for breath
then drop
into darkness
and muffled silence;
rise and drop again;
again; again;
but fifteen minutes later
it is only I who fails
to heed the call;
only I, eyes closed,
focused on the proper form
of survival
floating; only I
who remain in the deep end
while the rest, having climbed
on deck, point and laugh;
even the instructor,
blissfully unaware
that I am now prepared to crawl.
***
Barry Peters lives in Durham, North Carolina. Publications include Image, RHINO, Santa Clara Review, Southampton Review, Southern Review, Sugar House Review, and Swing.
