-love stories for two early baseballs-

the first story:

choose-up, and moving as fast

as sound permits, call "no chips"!

we'll rub the cowhide down

long before the time when we realized

why it was we were doing such a thing.

treasure the ball, and when the daylight's done,
walk it home as one would walk a little sister,––
in the palm of your hand.
this is the namesake of the game,
its summer days rolling fast up the middle,

dropping into the gap at center, slapping
into the riven pocket of the catcher's mitt, sailing

in the knuckleball's stillness toward the batter's knees,
waiting on the day when bounding
on the pavement beyond the right field fence, the sewer
comes to drink her down.

the second story:

under the porch keeping company

with webs long abandoned by spiders

lies an old Diamond D at permanent rest. irretrievable.

its cowhide is washed-out by weather and water,
its workings exposed in the brown, spiny filament
whose struggle for space ended years ago.

now its seams are torn at the gut like the fatal
wounds of war, its stitches seen in the quick
slip of daylight through the lattice are stilled,
but for an instant under the spike of the Sun, still blood-
red as twilight dropping westward beyond the backstop,

setting below the waterline of the river.