Opening Day and the Great Poets of Any Age

It's a wonder they don't

throw their hands up

and quit trying to get through

amid the noise and the clutter.

But on those rare occasions

when they succeed, like today,

you're grateful for all their persistence—

you fall in love again

with their tangle of language,

the serious virtue and naughtiness,

the dead-on mot justes,

and their insistence on according

humor a good place at the table.

You say "Thank you" and turn on

the ball game, quite certain

that they will all join in the viewing,

staying until the very last out,

cheering from somewhere beautiful.

Tim Suermondt has published two chapbooks and two full-length collections of poems, Trying To Help The Elephant Man Dance from Backwaters Press, 2007, and Just Beautiful from New York Quarterly Books, 2010. He's had poems in many magazines and online, including The Georgia Review, Poetry, Poetry East, Blackbird, Poetry Northwest, Atlanta Review, and Bellevue Literary Review, with poems forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Prairie Schooner, and Stand Magazine (U.K.) among others. He has poems in Poetry after 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets (Melville House Publications, 2002) and Visiting Walt (a Whitman anthology from the University of Iowa Press, 2003.)  He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.