Poem of the Week 2024/40

Grand Slam

Dreams brimming over,

childhood stretched out in legs,

this is the moment replayed on winter days

when frost covers the field,

when age steals away wishes.

Glorious sleep that seeps back there

to the glory of our baseball days.

– Marjorie Maddox

Here is another baseball poem, as we head into the playoffs.

Other sports inspire poets (wrestling & boxing poems go back to the classical Greeks, & Pindar is best known for his odes to athletes in the original Olympics) but baseball is the pre-eminent sport of American poetry, partly because the professional leagues stretch back to the nineteenth century &, until recent decades when football & basketball matched if not surpassed it in popularity, it was, if not the only game in town, the only one that really mattered to the majority of Americans. The season's steady unfolding, from spring through summer to fall, mirrored the year's cycle of planting, growth, & harvest; the green field, the slow but steady pace, the way fanship for the local nine was often passed from parent to child, the ever-lengthening history & lore of the game, & maybe above all, the very high rate of defeat & loss among even the greatest players made the sport irresistible to a certain cast of poetic mind, whether the mind belonged to a practicing poet or not.

Nothing in my description above is wrong, but of course there was more, mostly a sad & even sordid story of underpaid & overworked players, economic chicanery, & embedded racism (when it was revealed that Barry Bonds broke the home run record while taking performance-enhancing drugs, there was much talk of putting an asterisk by his record; but every player who preceded Jackie Robinson's entry into the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 should also have an asterisk by his name, for playing in segregated leagues). For all the talk of fan love & loyalty, was that ever, in the eyes of the owners, more than a marketing strategy? Just last week, our East Bay team played its final game in its long-time home, before decamping to what its owner hopes will be the more lucrative location of Las Vegas.

But the dreams are as real as the more brutal facts of what is usually considered reality (usually, in fact, "harsh reality"); for some people, ascending into the dreams & ignoring the sordid aspects of reality is what poetry is.

It's only in the title of this poem that we find out what's happened: someone has hit a grand slam (for those who don't know, a grand slam is when the three bases are loaded & the hitter at bat hits a home run, meaning the team scores four runs – a sizeable leap forward in a baseball score). The very first word of the poem, other than the title, is dreams, which cues us into the tone here: a burst of action, possibly (probably?) meaning victory, with an immediate segue to dreams, dreams in the sense of imagination, fantasy, wishful thinking. These players are young, as we can infer from the reference in the next line to childhood – perhaps they think this moment of glory is what life, or at least their lives, will be like. It's a very active scene: the dreams brim over, the legs stretch out (I take this to refer to the players running as they round the bases). Childhood stretched out in legs is a peculiar way to phrase the action, though: it must be more than literally stretching the legs to run; their childhood itself is being stretched out, lengthened by this memorable moment in the sun, with the suggestion that childhood is an innocent & carefree time (of course, as with baseball, the reality of childhood is often much tougher & more troubled & more troubling).

But after this brief moment of success, presented not through the scoreboard or cheers but as perceived, in their fructifying imaginations, by the players – or by the viewers; the poem could be read either way – things immediately turns reflective; taking this moment & enshrining it as a moment, as a spot of time outside of the usual. It becomes a memory played over & over during winter, the only season when baseball isn't being played. Winter, of course, also connotes aging, shivering cold, & death (or at least the end of something significant).

After the turn of this line, we have two lines dwelling on winter: frost covers the field (most obviously, the baseball diamond, but the field could be any place where crops are raised, or children play). Cold takes over, the greenery dies. Age steals away wishes: just as a runner in baseball can steal a base that he hasn't "earned" through a teammate's hit, so age can take us unawares, advancing us towards the end. Age steals away wishes: not only do we suffer physical decline, but there is a narrowing of our vision & our hopes. After the two lines in the beginning that imply a wonderful athletic feat, the rest of the poem is a poignant description of how memory sustains us through life's diminishments.

What is left? Glorious sleep, the state in which we dream, though these are not the hopeful dreams of a youth who has hit a grand slam, or someone who's watching him round the bases; these are the dreams that come to us, their passive recipients, during the night. The sleep seeps back there – to the back of our mind? back to the time when we had our moment of glory? Seeps obviously echoes, with a labile diminution, sleep; it also is a slower, less active image than the brimming over of the first line, reflecting the loss that age & winter have brought on us. Glory in the final line echoes the glorious of the preceding line; the sleep is glorious, the glory belongs to our (past) baseball days: glorious & glory describe our memories, our past, our past hopes; glory & glorious do not describe us, though their memory may help sustain us until new players take the field.

When I was a boy, I was completely unathletic; it wasn't until I moved to Boston as a young man that I was caught up in the Red Sox fandom, which was not only intense, but year-round (this was long before Tom Brady made the Patriots much-watched football champions). Even in winter, the sports page (we all bought daily newspapers then) was centered on the Sox. When the ball went through Bill Buckner's legs in 1986, & yet another World Series slipped away, we heard about companies that hired grief counselors to help their employees cope with this latest devastation (& I thought to myself, after this I do not want to hear one more joke about touchy-feely Californians). I moved back west long before the Red Sox finally won a world series in 2004, but I still followed them from a distance & went to see them when they played in this area. But after 2004 & its moment of historic exhilaration, my interest declined. The romance (of striking loss, when victory seemed possible) had gone out of it. And more & more games went on expensive cable stations I didn't get, & I gradually stopped following teams in any coherent way. Harsher realities took over, as is their wont (there's the long-running story about the Curse of the Bambino, but it's more like the curse of Jackie Robinson; the Red Sox were the last major league team to integrate, & as a result they missed out on some game-changing players). But – well, how do I end this paragraph? Maybe I'll just leave it there, teetering uneasily between memory & reality, loss & nostalgia & longing.

I took this poem from Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems, edited by Gabriel Fried.