Museum Monday 2024/43

 

detail from one of the Battle of Pavia tapestries, currently on view at the de Young Museum as part of the special exhibit Art and War in the Renaissance: The Battle of Pavia Tapestries

Friday Photo 2024/42

 

a view from the #1 California bus, San Francisco

Poem of the Week 2024/42

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west.

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the deathbed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

    This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

    To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

– William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

This sumptuous & celebrated sonnet is, on the surface, deceptively simple. Each of the three quatrains takes a standard trope indicating waning energies / the end of life – the autumn of the year, sunset &  night falling, a fire dying into embers – & works it into a vivid poetic statement, followed by a concluding couplet suggesting the recipient, seeing these things, can only feel love strengthened by impending loss.

The first quatrain portrays Fall not in the usual terms of fields bared by harvest but by the dying leaves (there's nothing fruitful here). Yet there's something odd in the second line when the poet initially says no leaves are left on the boughs but then immediately amends that to "well, maybe a few" – why the self-revision? Why the insistence on some remaining energy? It's not a word order necessitated by rhyme, so something else must be going on.

After this odd moment, the poet returns to the description of Fall: cold (the coldness of Winter / Death) is approaching, which makes the boughs shake (almost as if they were human limbs shivering). The boughs are likened, in a famous phrase, to bare ruined choirs, likening the natural world of trees stripped of leaves to the surrounding English landscape dotted with monastic ruins. It's worth remembering that those ruins were, just a few decades before Shakespeare was born, vital institutions, until Henry VIII decided he was better off without them. Again, this is perhaps a suggestion that beneath this image of wasting away is some underlying vitality, at least until quite recently, which is what late means in this context (as when we refer to a recently deceased person as the late X). Associating himself with the choirs is also a way of emphasizing that the speaker is older than the recipient, perhaps of a generation that could remember back to the choirs when they were, like the poet, singing. Is there something a touch histrionic in the sweet birds, especially coming, as they do, after a sere series of terms: dead leaves, stripped boughs, shaking with cold, bare, ruined: even words that have a different function, like hang & late, carry overtones of suffering & missing out.

The second stanza runs along much the same lines: the speaker compares himself to twilight; the busy day has sunk out of sight, & by and by black night (oblivion, & not just the temporary oblivion of sleep, Death's second self) covers all. By and by also seems perhaps a touch melodramatic, indicating an impending darkness that is less imminent than it actually would be at that time of day.

The third stanza follows a similar pattern: it opens, as does the second, with In me thou seest, followed by an elaboration of a basic metaphor for ending: this time, it's a fire dying out. The fire, reduced to a glow, is at the stage where it is being consumed by the ash it has already produced, the ashes, specifically, of a spent youth. The metaphor is strengthened by the invocation of a deathbed. But, again, there is an emphasis on the strength that was there, & which has not quite entirely disappeared, though the end is near.

So what is going on here? It's important to remember that Shakespeare's sonnets were initially circulated in manuscript (this was not an unusual practice) & when they were published, it was, apparently, without the poet's agreement or supervision. No one really know why or to whom Shakespeare wrote the series (though theories, of course, abound). This sonnet is part of the series traditionally held to have been addressed to an unknown young man, though there's nothing in the phrasing of this particular poem that genders the recipient, & the order of the sonnets as they've come down to us may be by someone other than the poet.

Clearly, though, a single individual is being addressed here: the thou who is repeatedly conjured to notice the impending end of the speaker must be not only an individual, but an intimate (thou strikes a modern reader as formal, because it is archaic, but in Shakespeare's day it was, like the French tu, the singular second person, used for an intimate or social inferior). One of the many unknowable things about the sonnets is when exactly they were written, but scholarly speculation is that he wrote them, give or take a few years, around the age of 30. Even considering that death came earlier then for most people (Shakespeare himself was 52 when he died), it seems a bit odd for a man in his 30s – out of his youth, but one would think in the prime of his life – to draw repeated & elaborate attention to his oncoming demise. And he seems aware that his recipient is maybe not giving him his full attention; each quatrain opens with instructions on what the recipient is supposed to be seeing, & the speaker feels the need to make his point three separate times, in three separate ways, though always with some similar adjuration: thou mayst in me behold or (twice) In me thou seest.

After repeatedly telling his apparently younger friend that the end is near, the concluding couplet sums up the lesson, as it usually does in sonnets with this three-quatrains-and-a-couplet construction: all this I'm telling you is going to make your love for me even stronger, as you won't have me around to love for much longer. But the phrasing is notable: this thou perceiv'st: perceive means to become aware or conscious of something, to come to a realization, to interpret or view someone or something in a particular way: in other words, this is not something the recipient is realizing on his own (otherwise, why would the speaker have to reinforce the image repeatedly?) but something the speaker hopes the recipient will come to realize, a learned response, an insight he will, at some point, achieve – someday, when I'm gone, you'll wish you'd loved me more! Also, given the preceding quatrains, all of which suggest it is the speaker who will be leaving, the last line suddenly makes the recipient the one who will be leaving. Is the speaker perhaps aware that the recipient is drifting away from him, & the whole sonnet is, essentially, a dramatic speech warning him that the speaker won't be around forever & he should keep loving him while he can? Does the strange shift in who is leaving intimate that the speaker knows, perhaps on a not-quite conscious level, that the recipient is planning on leaving him?

Another thing no one knows about Shakespeare's sonnets is what relation, if any, they bear to his life. There is an assumption that they are autobiographical (if only we could crack the code!), but that may or may not be true – we are, after all, talking about probably the greatest dramatist in history; clearly he was able to imagine himself into all sorts of moods & situations that have little, no, or tangential connection to the facts of his biography. There seems something a touch theatrical, even slightly comic, but also deeply moving, about this sonnet read as a speech (& keep in mind that Shakespeare did incorporate sonnets into some of his plays, most famously when Romeo & Juliet meet for the first time): we have here a man summoning up dazzling rhetorical powers to persuade a younger & perhaps slightly uninterested friend that in fact his (the poet's) end is near & that's all the more reason to keep his (the friend's) love strong. Hence the underlying hints of on-going vigor beneath the eloquent, picturesque invocations of impending death. In this light, the poem, no matter what remove it is from Shakespeare's lived experience, is not only gorgeous, but also slightly comic, & also deeply poignant: comic & poignant in the way of all attempts to persuade someone else that their love for us should be as strong (at least!) as our love for them.

There are many editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, of course: I use the Signet Classic.

Museum Monday 2024/42

 

detail of Woman Arranging Her Veil, a pastel by Mary Cassatt, seen at the Legion of Honor as part of the special exhibit Mary Cassatt at Work

Friday Photo 2024/41

 

on the Embarcadero, San Francisco, morning

Poem of the Week 2024/41

Life and Death

Life is not sweet. One day it will be sweet

    To shut our eyes and die:

Nor feel the wild flowers blow, nor birds dart by

    With flitting butterfly;

Nor grass grow long above our heads and feet,

Nor hear the happy lark that soars sky high,

Nor sigh that spring is fleet and summer fleet,

    Nor mark the waxing wheat,

Nor know who sits in our accustomed seat.

Life is not good. One day it will be good

    To die, then live again;

To sleep meanwhile: so not to feel the wane

Of shrunk leaves dropping in the wood,

Nor hear the foamy lashing of the main,

Nor mark the blackened bean-fields, nor where stood

    Rich ranks of golden grain

Only dead refuse stubble clothe the plain:

Asleep from risk, asleep from pain.

– Christina Rossetti

This sensuous lyric is disturbing; its elegant formal form a vessel for bleak thoughts. Each stanza begins with a blanket denial of a positive view of life: life is not sweet, nor is it good. Sweetness & goodness will only follow death; in the first stanza, it is specifically losing sight of the world, followed by death, that will lead to sweetness. What follows then is a loving list of things worth seeing, things that would seem to make the world & life in it sweet: wild flowers, birds & butterflies flitting past, the happy lark (that recurring symbol in English poetry of a joyful dawn breaking afresh), the fields of wheat growing. These are not things obviously calculated to convince us that death is preferable to life, even though some of the details point us towards understanding the poet's distress: the grass is growing long, but above our heads & feet (we are buried beneath it, in other words), we are sighing at the brevity of the sunny, burgeoning & fruitful seasons (even the flitting butterflies can be read as a sign of transitoriness), someone else (a friend, a rival, some new person unknown to us) has taken our usual place with our friends. We are given a list of beautiful things, but all of them pass from us. Rather than enjoying them while they last, or seeing their passing as part of their beauty, the poet, despite her obvious admiration of these things, her loving cataloguing of natural abundance, rejects them (though perhaps with some residual longing).

The second stanza maintains the inventiveness & formal perfection of the first (each of them uses only two rhymes throughout, a wonderful thing to achieve without visible strain in famously rhyme-poor English), though it does darken the picture: this time the catalogue of nature moves from the spring & summer of the first stanza to fall & winter, times of bleakness & decay: the dead leaves are dropping, the sea lashes the coast, the harvest (the bean & wheat fields) are blackened & filled with stubble. (The waxing of the wheat in the first stanza is balanced & undercut in the second by the waning of the shrunk leaves). Again the narrator denies that goodness can have a part in this on-going cycle: what is good is to die. But then she adds, almost parenthetically, then live again.

Perhaps as we read this stanza's list of decaying nature, we are keeping in mind the first stanza's springtime, & its usual return after the time of fallen leaves & fields emptied after the harvest. This thought does not seem to be enough for the poet, though; it seems to be the endless cycling that troubles her. So what is the living again that would be as good as death? Given Rossetti's strong Christian beliefs, it is presumably life after death, the resurrection of the dead at the Last Judgment, when the world will be purged into a new & perfected entity.

It is the feeling of decay, the sighing over the fleetness of beauty, that leaves the poet stricken; at the end, she longs to be Asleep from risk, asleep from pain. It is stasis she longs for, respite from the constant shifting of the world, something solid to stand on, some beauty that isn't passing away before our eyes. We are, at least at this cultural moment, so cued to embrace & celebrate risk & change (often in ways that seem designed to make us accept unacceptable & avoidable social, political, or economic states) that it's kind of breathtaking & refreshing to read someone who rejects the premise, even as she balances it with what is clearly a sense of the sweet & good things in life.

But it's also disturbing to hear someone say such things, because life is unavoidably filled with risk, & loss, & pain, & so rejecting them is rejecting existence. If a friend expressed these sentiments, one might suggest counseling, or even medication for deep depression. (Though no work of art, particularly one as gorgeously wrought as this, can be truly despairing; a true, devastating belief in worthlessness & futility wouldn't see the point, or have the strength, of creation). Or one might admire the strength of her philosophy, an unflinching Christian stoicism that, while it may cut her off from some pleasures, also helps shield her from some pain (though, given the agonized divergence between how lovingly she notes the world & how bleakly she considers it, the reader might question how much pain she is really protecting herself from).

Perhaps it is significant that the poem's title is Life and Death, not Life or Death: there is no choice forced between the two; life & death are balanced. It's not that unusual for someone in the midst of life to realize we are in death: media vita in morte sumus, as the Gregorian chant has it, a phrase also translated into the Book of Common Prayer, & so surely well known to Rossetti. And it's not unusual to have that realization, & to turn from it in horror, or pain, & to long for some good thing unchanging. But then we counterbalance that with the realities of life, including the beauty of much of it (or at least of the natural world; it's significant that all of Rossetti's examples come from nature; humanity is only implied in things like the accustomed seat or the harvested fields or, of course, the grave). I can see someone having very different reactions to this poem depending on their faith tradition & personal beliefs or their life experience or just their current mood: one person might have very different reactions at different times. In this world, even our reading of a single poem is constantly shifting, changing, uncertain.

I took this from the Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti.

Museum Monday 2024/41

 

four tiles with a figural scene, now at the Art Institute of Chicago

Live from the Met: Les Contes d'Hoffmann

This morning (west coast time) was the first Met livecast of the season, featuring one of my favorite operas, Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. When you really love a work there are two directions you can go in: either you find problems with every production, or you find something to love, love, love in every production (the same person can take either path, depending on the work & one's mood). In this case, I found much to love, love, love.

I had seen the Bartlett Sher production at the Met when it was new in 2009. I had to pay a "new production" premium on my ticket, which I wasn't expecting, but OK, if you're traveling to that expensive metropolis in the first place, you're in an extravagant mood. Perched in my parterre box (it was the closest I could get to the stage), I liked the production very much. Seeing it again, I liked it even more. It teeters in a sweet spot between sumptuous & seedy; its lyric flights & swoony, fantastical darkness (even the students' drinking song at the opening blithely suggest violence & mayhem, before veering off into paeans to wine & beer), even its rich, deep colors shading into darkness, convincingly convey the spirit of the titular poet.

The stage opens in darkness, with a shabby desk & an old typewriter in the lower right corner; Hoffmann is also there, & if not drunk, then distraught. Pages flutter down from overhead. His muse enters, vows to save him, & disguises herself as his friend Nicklausse. The scene expands to the tavern, & then segues to the first act, Olympia, the mechanical doll that Hoffmann thinks is real, & is his ideal. This act has a George Grosz feel, full of dark energy & louche members of the demimonde. It also shares the aesthetic of the circus, not the slick, streamlined circuses of today, but the tawdry, sweaty glamour of the late nineteenth century circus (an inspiration for artists from Dickens to Picasso). The walls are striped, like a tent. There is a freak-show ambiance. Lulu-haircuts parade past leering clowns. Limbs festoon the walls, the eyeballs in Coppelius's bin drip viscously. Olympia is a vivid slash of pink with a cartoonishly high golden crown on. She is multiplied by dancers, as is the rose-bespectacled & besotted Hoffmann. It all goes to smash over a money dispute, & the circus leaves town.

The Antonia act comes next in this version. The setting is more stripped down but just as dreamlike: against a twilight blue, silhouettes of trees in varying shades of gray hang behind the mostly bare stage. There is a piano in the foreground, covered with music which mostly gets ignored or shoved aside. Dr Miracle arrives in a playful sort of horse-drawn buggy which also manages to suggest Sjöström's film The Phantom Carriage. Antonia's father, in a richly brocaded robe, broods over her mother's fate, & hers. He is not fond of Hoffmann. Antonia, encouraged by Dr Miracle, sings herself to death, & another of Hoffmann's loves expires. The more restrained staging of this intimate, more domestic act is a buffer between the more lavish, more social setting of the first & final acts.

That final act, in Venice, is suitably, lavishly carnivalesque. There are the Venetian signifiers: a dark red gondola, & a prancing, comically menacing Punchinello, straight out of Tiepolo. An increasingly desperate & cynical Hoffmann (even the tenor's hair is picturesquely askew) is now hopelessly entangled with an outright courtesan, Giuletta. She, seduced by a glittering diamond, seduces him, stealing even his reflection. The desperate Hoffmann murders a rival for a woman he longs for but also loathes. This act, possibly the darkest & most cynical in the work, opens with the lilting loveliness of the famous barcarolle. Death in Venice indeed, & we return to the tavern, where the half-mad Hoffmann, drunkenly hallucinating these tales, loses his chance at the actual woman he is in love with. As in Proust, the lover creates the loved one, only to discover that his invention does not quite overlay the actual person. But as he collapses in a drunken haze of despair, his Muse steps out of her Nicklausse drag (retaining the elegant top hat) & leads him to sit down at his neglected typewriter. This lovely & savage opera, teetering on the edge of full-blown tragedy, ends on a hopeful note: as the choral voices soar behind him, his fingers curl above the keyboard, & (again as in Proust) he begins to turn the grit & irritants (or the outright devastations) of his life into the nacreous splendor of his art.

Tenor Ben Bliss was our affable livecast host. It's always a bit jarring, though, to have the fourth wall so immediately dismantled; right after an act's finale, the singers, with professional aplomb, come right out & discuss their roles in the trajectory of their careers or other such matters, while the audience (some of us, anyway) are still swirling in the dreams they created. This was conductor Marco Armiliato's 500th performance at the Met; as you might expect from that record, he does a very good job, though he made some odd remarks about ranking Hoffmann slightly below the greatest operas, like Parsifal. (But it's pointless to compare anything to Parsifal, even (in the spirit of Cary Grant saying he wished that he, too, were Cary Grant) Parsifal itself.) What's the point of ranking things like that? (Maybe the maestro wasn't conveying his thoughts well in what was obviously not his mother language?)

Ever since I saw him in the livecast of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette (my thoughts here), I have been looking forward to Benjamin Bernheim as Hoffmann, & he was splendid in this long & challenging role. Hoffmann is what Romeo might perhaps have turned into if he had survived Rosaline, & Juliet, & some post-Capulet woman; as with all ardent romantics, after a certain amount of experience his idealism has edged towards cynicism & even despair. The slightly frayed elegance of his demeanor is nicely contrasted with the looming solidity of his impressive rival, as embodied by Christian Van Horn, the one's passionate & soaring tenor outcries sabotaged by the other's amused bass-baritone undercuts. The woman are also dazzling: Erin Morley is wittily precise but also strangely moving as the robot love Olympia; Pretty Yende is warm & captivating as Antonia & appealing as Stella, the "real-life" diva Hoffmann loves; Clémentine Margaine is a juicy Giuletta. Vasilisa Berzhanskaya was a forthright & faithful Muse/Nicklausse. I hope they release this splendid performance on Blu-Ray. I would love to watch it late into the night.

Afterwards I went across the street to a brewpub, having consumed nothing all day but a latte & some lozenges. Perhaps foolishly I downed most of my first pumpkin ale before my pizza arrived, leaving me in a Hoffmannesque haze. One of the baseball playoff games was on a screen near me, so I'd glance up from time to time for the comforting familiarity of the autumnal scenes: the pitcher leaning forward, shaking off the catcher; the hitter swinging &, most of the time, missing, the crowd bedecked in team colors, milling around. . . . Then I saw something I usually manage to avoid: not only a political ad, but one for Trump. After warning me that illegal aliens were being given transgender operations (seriously, though this sounds like some sort of fascist-swamp fever dream Mad Libs), the ad assured me that "President Trump was on my side". If he's on my side, I'm switching sides. As I pondered this into my second pumpkin ale, I decided that I hope aliens really are being given transgender operations: why not give the wretched of the earth something besides more misery? I'd much rather have my tax money spent on that than on making billionaires into squillionaires, or whatever the next step in their deification is. During the livecast interviews, the set & costume designers (Michael Yeargen & Catherine Zuber, respectively) had mentioned the "Kafkaesque" atmosphere they were trying for. I personally was leaning more towards Weimar, but we all agreed on touches of the surreal & the dreamlike. But then I leave the theater & find myself in a world in which a vicious clown like Trump is actually a serious contender for President, & I have to ask, what does Kafkaesque or surreal really mean these days? What is a dream? If this is a dream, when will we wake?

Friday Photo 2024/40

 

a seagull at the Ferry Building, San Francisco

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.