The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Moira Linehan
In the Moment Before
Remember: my Boys of Summer, wild card
in 2004, down three games to none against the Yankees—the Yankees, what hope was there?— my Boys came back and beat them, then beat the Cardinals to win it all, first time since 1918. But my father, who’d died waiting for them to do just that, had taught me year in, year out, They’ll break your heart every time. And so these days if they’re playing when I go to bed at nine— fourth, fifth, sixth inning depending on how fast each pitcher’s working, how many three-up/ three-down innings, or how many bats are hot, which way the wind’s blowing—I go to bed, Keats knows, in a cloud of unknowing. Ahead one, two, three runs, I know this game’s poetry, its rhythmic ups and downs and outs so I know nothing. For I know this game can turn on just one wrong pitch, dropped ball, bad call. Yet if I want to be awake all day tomorrow, I need to wait till then to know the end. Keats, okay with that, as he wrote in 1818 it’s about being in the moment without any . . . reaching after. So tonight, a line drive hit toward the Pesky Pole, the wall, in the moment before it’s fair or foul, caught or sailing out, Keats wants I just hang with it, in air, the beauty of it. Black Taxi Tour, Belfast, 2016
an ABeCeDarius SonnetAitch or haitch: during the Troubles, how you said the eighth letter could be critical. As in, life or death. Yet still in Belfast today the need, each to know, Are you British or Irish? Still the grim gulf ground of Falls Road and its graffitied wall. The South in the North: on one lawn the Virgin Mary while the Union J kites above the next block. Twenty years a peace accord and still murals remember hunger strikes, plaques name men gunned down openly here, here, here. Falls Road gates still locked each night to stop, quips our Black Taxi Tour guide, us killing each other. This tour showing peace hangs by a thread. As do many poems. Much art. You have two ancient histories, each marching down a chute toward a vee. What’s the point of all this? Who’s ever going to solve for X? Yeats stitched and unstitched lines. And stitched again. Never absolute Z. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |