Tucked
away in a corner surrounded by woods.
You get a right-handed batter with a mean cut, foul,
or a 315 shot,
and the ball is lost.
Today, I am the ball,
unfound in the woods
tucked away in the corner of Brophy Field,
some run down middle-school baseball diamond
that is perfect.
Dandelions like stars, everywhere.
Clippings from last week’s mow, brown.
Home plate, solid,
and the pitcher’s mound, too,
buried deep in the scorched earth.
I saw it from the road, pulled into the lot,
and walked out to left field.
It’s the left field of Endy Chavez
and high school and summer camp.
It’s the left field of the fascists and liberals and gun runners and gangsters
and little kids named Brenda and Dave and Javier and Marisol and Matthew
all of who stood out and waited and ran and dove and got bored and, mostly,
spent hours in the grass, watching the grass,
waiting on the sound off the bat, waiting for their moment.
Today, the world’s moment is a carousel gone off the rails.
There is bird shit everywhere and everywhere we are lost.
Left field is not lost.
Left field is never lost.
It’s always where it’s supposed to be, in left.
Left of center, edge of the diamond
bordering the woods
where balls go gone
and sometimes little boys, for a second,
disappear into the green to make the catch,
to retrieve the ball.
And when they emerge
sometimes they are still little boys
and sometimes they’ve been gone so long
they return as men.
Me, I stood out there today in the blistering heat with no baseball glove or cap
to speak of.
I was right where I was supposed to be,
on the team of the earth,
and the birds and the trees did their thing
and left does its thing, being left,
forever left,
no matter how many foul balls of history get swallowed up
into the forest primeval.