Baseball and Writing

Marianne Moore - 1887-1972

(Suggested by post-game broadcasts)

Fanaticism?  No.  Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
   You can never tell with either
      how it will go
      or what you will do;
   generating excitement—
   a fever in the victim—
   pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.
	Victim in what category?
Owlman watching from the press box?
	To whom does it apply?
	Who is excited?  Might it be I?

It’s a pitcher’s battle all the way—a duel—
a catcher’s, as, with cruel
   puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly
      back to plate.  (His spring 
      de-winged a bat swing.)
   They have that killer instinct;
   yet Elston—whose catching
   arm has hurt them all with the bat—
	when questioned, says, unenviously,
   “I’m very satisfied.  We won.”
	Shorn of the batting crown, says, “We”;
	robbed by a technicality.

When three players on a side play three positions
and modify conditions,
   the massive run need not be everything.
      “Going, going . . . ”  Is
      it?  Roger Maris
   has it, running fast.  You will
   never see a finer catch.  Well . . .
   “Mickey, leaping like the devil”—why
	gild it, although deer sounds better—
snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,
	one-handing the souvenir-to-be
	meant to be caught by you or me.

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral;
he could handle any missile.
   He is no feather.  “Strike! . . . Strike two!”
      Fouled back.  A blur.
      It’s gone.  You would infer
   that the bat had eyes.
   He put the wood to that one.
Praised, Skowron says, “Thanks, Mel.
   I think I helped a little bit.”
	All business, each, and modesty.
        Blanchard, Richardson, Kubek, Boyer.
	In that galaxy of nine, say which
	won the pennant?  Each.  It was he.

Those two magnificent saves from the knee-throws
by Boyer, finesses in twos—
   like Whitey's three kinds of pitch and pre-
      diagnosis
      with pick-off psychosis.
   Pitching is a large subject.
   Your arm, too true at first, can learn to
   catch your corners—even trouble
	Mickey Mantle.  (“Grazed a Yankee!
My baby pitcher, Montejo!”
	With some pedagogy,
	you’ll be tough, premature prodigy.)

They crowd him and curve him and aim for the knees.  Trying
indeed!  The secret implying:
   “I can stand here, bat held steady.”
      One may suit him;
       none has hit him.
   Imponderables smite him.
   Muscle kinks, infections, spike wounds
   require food, rest, respite from ruffians.  (Drat it!
	Celebrity costs privacy!)
Cow’s milk, “tiger’s milk,” soy milk, carrot juice,
	brewer’s yeast (high-potency—
	concentrates presage victory

sped by Luis Arroyo, Hector Lopez—
deadly in a pinch.  And “Yes,
   it’s work; I want you to bear down,
      but enjoy it
      while you’re doing it.”
   Mr. Houk and Mr. Sain,
   if you have a rummage sale,
   don’t sell Roland Sheldon or Tom Tresh.
	Studded with stars in belt and crown,
the Stadium is an adastrium.
	O flashing Orion,
	your stars are muscled like the lion.

For authorities whose hopes are shaped by mercenaries? Writers entrapped by teatime fame and by commuters' comforts? Not for these the paper nautilus constructs her thin glass shell. Giving her perishable souvenir of hope, a dull white outside and smooth- edged inner surface glossy as the sea, the watchful maker of it guards it day and night; she scarcely eats until the eggs are hatched. Buried eight-fold in her eight arms, for she is in a sense a devil- fish, her glass ram'shorn-cradled freight is hid but is not crushed; as Hercules, bitten by a crab loyal to the hydra, was hindered to succeed, the intensively watched eggs coming from the shell free it when they are freed,— leaving its wasp-nest flaws of white on white, and close- laid Ionic chiton-folds like the lines in the mane of a Parthenon horse, round which the arms had wound themselves as if they knew love is the only fortress strong enough to trust to.

Although the aepyornis or roc that lived in Madagascar, and the moa are extinct, the camel-sparrow, linked with them in size--the large sparrow Xenophon saw walking by a stream--was and is a symbol of justice. This bird watches his chicks with a maternal concentration-and he's been mothering the eggs at night six weeks--his legs their only weapon of defense. He is swifter than a horse; he has a foot hard as a hoof; the leopard is not more suspicious. How could he, prized for plumes and eggs and young used even as a riding-beast, respect men hiding actor-like in ostrich skins, with the right hand making the neck move as if alive and from a bag the left hand strewing grain, that ostriches might be decoyed and killed! Yes, this is he whose plume was anciently the plume of justice; he whose comic duckling head on its great neck revolves with compass-needle nervousness when he stands guard, in S-like foragings as he is preening the down on his leaden-skinned back. The egg piously shown as Leda's very own from which Castor and Pollux hatched, was an ostrich-egg. And what could have been more fit for the Chinese lawn it grazed on as a gift to an emperor who admired strange birds, than this one, who builds his mud-made nest in dust yet will wade in lake or sea till only the head shows. . . . . . . . Six hundred ostrich-brains served at one banquet, the ostrich-plume-tipped tent and desert spear, jewel- gorgeous ugly egg-shell goblets, eight pairs of ostriches in harness, dramatize a meaning always missed by the externalist. The power of the visible is the invisible; as even where no tree of freedom grows, so-called brute courage knows. Heroism is exhausting, yet it contradicts a greed that did not wisely spare the harmless solitaire or great auk in its grandeur; unsolicitude having swallowed up all giant birds but an alert gargantuan little-winged, magnificently speedy running-bird. This one remaining rebel is the sparrow-camel.

Man looking into the sea, taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to yourself, it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing, but you cannot stand in the middle of this; the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave. The firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top, reserved as their contours, saying nothing; repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look. There are others besides you who have worn that look— whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate them for their bones have not lasted: men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave, and row quickly away—the blades of the oars moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such thing as death. The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx—beautiful under networks of foam, and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed; the birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as heretofore— the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath them; and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bellbuoys, advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink— in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.

Poems

Baseball and Writing

More by Marianne Moore

The Paper Nautilus

He "Digesteth Harde Yron"

A Grave

poets.org

academy of american poets

national poetry month

american poets

Poems

Baseball and Writing

Newsletter Sign Up

Support Us

Follow Us