If I say, Go gently, go loudly, go as gently or loudly
as you wish. Do not do as I say.

If I say, Go to the light, stay as long as you like.
Do not ask what this light is, or that I point it out to you.

The sky is ink today, a white neither cloud or ooze.
Fog would like to catch us snoozing before trees go full bloom,

waiting for the slip between winter and spring, as if we can see
seasons on their way in and out.

I’ll pour you a shot of booze in your favorite glass tonight.
Come in as you wish and drink.

If you forget how to sip, funnel your lips. Fall back
in a bend against the floor.

After your swallow, choose any cobweb you like as yours.
Or float through a mirror at first chance.

I’ll keep busy watching shadows rise and fall,
catching glimpses of something glinting in the yard.

–

What strikes me most about Parker’s brief collection, winner of the 2009 Qarrtsiluni Chapbook Contest (judged by Dinty Moore) is just how easily the book lulls the reader into the plane of memory. Parker does a wonderful job connecting us with moments that belong to others, which in turn brings us back to ourselves. Suddenly we are at the window gazing at “stands of green bamboo,” and our own version of “Old Mrs. Sonnenkratz.”

A Walk Through is more about the observed than the observer. The poems unfold in a way that feels akin to sitting with an old friend who answers the question, “How are you?” by describing what she’s seen.

Most of the poems are situational, starting with the lead piece, “78 RPM,” (a first kiss moment between two young lovers, away from the watchful eye of a doting aunt). In each unique setting, Parker gives us enough room to make our own emotional connections — nervousness, anxiety, excitement, lust. Rather than tell us how any of this feels, we’re allowed to remember. As we squint at the images that churn up, we fall deeper into our own memories and pasts.

Time and again, image leads us into these scenes. In delivering her poems to us, Parker paints just enough fuzz over her pictures so that when we focus in, we have no choice but to latch on to whatever emotion swims by. This see-saw between the lives of others and of our own comes to a head in “Taking a Walk with You,” the sixth poem in the collection of ten.

The poem starts with an epigraph from Kenneth Koch, “Walk forwards and backwards with me.” Koch was part of the New York School of poetry, renown for their reliance on objectivity and image. It’s no wonder then that Parker creates a connection here with Koch, as the poem, even as it touches mortality, has more to do with the walk than the walkers.

This brief pass through the woods is as sad and real as anything I’ve read in a while.

-
“Gazing into Wet
    Creek’s tapestry, through
      the warp and weft of

minnows weaving
    in shafts of sunlight, echoed
      in the shadows of

the sawgrass swaying,
    in the small stream’s undulance
      toward the river

torquing to the Ohio
    that somehow will spill
      into the Atlantic,

all salt spray hissing
    against rocks: the sound of
      repeatable longing.”

-

Later, when the poem shifts inward, Parker keeps us tied to the physical, focusing on the composition of the human anatomy rather than the stories we tell ourselves.

-
“Dear, the stents in
    your heart wend the same;

the plate and screws in my knees
    tell me before the skies do
      how they’ll be rain,”
-

Parker wants us to feel these things in our bones, then let the body convey the emotions attached. Before the poem ends, she offers one brief glimpse into our own unspoken longing, but again does so in a tactful, subtle manner.

-
“Now as we thread
    our way through cattails
      in gauzy light, there’s this

pause, an inrush of breath, holding
    it, holding your hand
      watching the water, the way

it flows, feeling my body moving
    toward yours, as the water reflects us
      as we were then, in its

mottled plane, mirror,
    mirror, our younger
      faces gazing back

at us from their side
    of this day,”
-

Another poet could have sent the narrator into the water, leaving any disconnected readers alone on the banks. Parker, instead, keeps us walking:

-
      “through cattails, through

muscadine, weaving through scything
    sawgrass, sumac, taking the path
      of least resistance.”
-

Whether her life as a medical editor lends itself to such objectivity or not, Parker certainly understands that the path of least resistance is the surest way through the void. With her calm language and quiet melancholy, she lets us build our own memories and name the emotions that come with them, reminding us of all the lovely things that make our time on earth so fleeting.

–

Read more reviews of A Walk Through the Memory Palace as part of Read Write Poem’s virtual book tour.

The following review of Sarah Sloat’s In the Voice of a Minor Saint, (© 2009, Tilt Press) is part of Read Write Poem’s poetry review series.

What sounds come from a minor saint’s mouth? What cadence, what mood, what music? Thinking of minor saints takes me back to my childhood. A soon-to-be-woebegone Catholic boy, I would drift in and out of reveries during mass, look up occasionally toward the front where the priest stood among a selection of heaven’s all stars in statue form: Mary, Jesus, John the Baptist, etc. Meanwhile, a sculpture of the boyish saint after whom the parish was named stood off to the side: St. Aloysius, or, as I called him, St. Al. Dressed in a frock, holding a book, he was an imp in the land of giants, a minor saint with a voice that couldn’t have been much more than a pip.

St. Al’s path toward sainthood reads as an interesting journey. Wikipedia does a fine job with the crib notes, and a few things stand out: he took a vow of chastity at age nine; he suffered from kidney trouble his entire life — Louise Hay might connect this to shame, criticism, and child-like reactions; his piety was such that he was too polite to look his queen in the face; he followed the Jesuit order much to the chagrin of his father, who had wanted him to be a soldier and, upon accepting this wouldn’t happen, at least wanted him to do something other than join the priesthood, which meant he would yield his rights to what would have been a substantial inheritance; and he died at the tender age of 23 at midnight on the summer solstice, in accordance with a vision he’d had a few days earlier. (Today he’s the patron saint of young students, Christian youth and AIDS patients.)

From this history we get the picture of a young man who walked away from a family legacy, who failed to live up to his father’s wishes, who transferred his own quiet suffering — on top of kidney disease, he was plagued with chronic headaches, skin diseases and insomnia — into a life of asceticism and spiritual awareness through isolation. His voice reaches through the darkness not in sobs but in the whisper of everyday prayers that balance on the edge of his lips; not self-righteous, but certainly self-aware; removed from the malaise, his spirit dips inward then beams out.

Sloat’s work possesses a similar sense of self-awareness and in-but-out beaming. We first encounter this passive separation in “Opportunity,” the short musing that leads the collection:

“There was a sound like a moccasin dropping
       in the upstairs apartment.”

We all know that sound, and if don’t, we at least know the sound of movement above us. Two more sounds follow: a boy shouts in Cantonese “near the end of the street,” and a radio wavers “between stations.” Sloat’s narrator is away from these sounds, within earshot but unaffected by thoughts of “I wonder what it all means?” The reader, too, comes in from these sounds, floats down and lands in the room with the narrator who’s busy becoming “marvelous.”

We never know to what opportunity the poem alludes. We don’t need to know. Sloat could have written an entirely different poem filled with opportunities lost and found. Instead we drop into this world of sounds we do not own; rather than seek sense or reason behind the sounds, we remain happily aloof, preparing for whatever opportunity waits.

One thought is that the opportunity is actually an invitation to turn the page and encounter “Pursuit,” where a similar sounding narrator goes through her morning rituals of coffee, cigarette, toast, horoscope and comic strip. Here Sloat has filled in many of the lines she left blank in “Opportunity.” The narrator brings us further in, moving from reflection into the self:

“Subversive joy of a broken heart, salt wallow
here’s to the suffering my father predicted
ah if he only knew
how beautiful

pain and ecstasy
as Christoph says, what a pair — ”

Despite the gravity of these lines, there’s a strange, almost surreal playfulness in the music that reminds me of the Beatles “A Day in the Life.”

( “Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head…” )

A poet of Sloat’s skill could easily build a collection on “day in the life” poetry. For the purpose of this volume, she has other songs to sing.

We finally meet her minor saint muse in the third poem, which bears the same title as the collection. Saint Appolonia, perhaps more humble than even our friend Saint Al, was a second-century virgin martyr who today is considered the “protectress against toothaches.” Here, Sloat’s narrator considers her own humble origins:

“I came at a wee hour
into my miniature existence.”

The voice, we discover, belongs to someone with a small heart, “like a love of buttons or black pepper.” And isn’t it so with all minor saints? These quiet ones of the dream come down to earth’s realm whenever there’s a lost cause (St. Jude), a bell in need of making (St. Agatha), a case of gout (St. Anthony) or a secretary having a bad day (St. Catherine of Siena). Meanwhile, Sloat’s language conjures a tender visage, creating the desire to cradle these poems, to rub your fingers through their smooth hair, to whisper how wonderful they are, to remind them the world is more beautiful with them in it.

Such passages truly make your heart ooze, and show up again and again throughout the collection. In “Ghazal with Heavenly Bodies,” we meet a moon full of “nicks and bite marks;” in “Humidity,” we’re reminded that “paradise may be built in a day but the rest takes time.” But Sloat’s work is not simply a batch of flowers and sweetness. In “Vestment,” a short, sharp narrative that closes the collection, we arrive “On the morning of my ruin,” and don “a vest of bees as the sun crimps the sky.”

Perhaps Sloat considers herself a minor saint in the vast cannon of modern poetry. Only she could say. Whatever the case, after reading and re-reading this collection, I feel she’s a tenacious spirit with a curious nature and thirst for language. Hopefully we’ll be enjoying the illumined sound of her soft voice for many years.

–
According to the bio on her blog, Sarah Sloat is a worker ant who currently lives in Frankfurt, Germany. Visit her site to learn more about her and her work.

–

INDEPENDENCE

I go into my office and close the door. Sometimes I wedge a chair in front of the door to keep people from opening. Once I’ve blocked out the world, the next thing I must do is escape from myself. I open the window, sit at my writing desk, unzip the back of my neck and float outside, leaving my body at the desk.

I strip from whatever clothes my soul might be wearing, leave them folded against my house and walk the neighborhood.

I sit and have dinner with whole families of strangers who can’t see me. The babies can see me, the toddlers especially. They don’t care that I’m naked. They laugh at my face and play with it, because my soul’s face, like my body’s, is funny and interesting to look at and touch, all full of jagged angles and slopes.

After dinner I leave through their windows, never the walls, because windows are made of water while walls are made of fudge, and therefore harder to pass through.

I walk until I find a street I’ve never walked down, usually near a church or bingo hall, some place where seniors gather. Some of the seniors can see me. When one does, it becomes a joke among the other seniors. Everyone’s mood lightens. My mood lightens.

I like to sit in the church and listen to people recite prayers. I get lost in the monotone nature of their praying, how their voices form a steady droll that becomes one great, many layered voice.

I wait until the last hymn then float through the top of the building and watch as the moon reaches the center point of the sky. Then I start the long walk back. I cut through as many windows I can, watch television in bed with couples, stand in corners until the family dog barks at me. I put my clothes on when I reach my house, float through the window and land inside my body, which has been slumped for hours pretending to get something done.

–

I still fall back on that sophomoric wisdom whenever I encounter the word. I’ve gone so far as to quiz other women, many of whom agree that the word, on some level, does “things” to them.

Therefore, when I picked up Moist Meridian (© 2009, Mammoth Books), Henry Hughes’ sophomore effort — his first full-length collection, Men Holding Eggs (© 2004, Mammoth) won him Rookie of the Year honors when it brought home that year’s Oregon Book Award for poetry — the title, coupled with the cover art (a beautiful rendering of a female nude by artist Richard Bunse), told me the poems within would be, in a word, sexy. (Never mind that the first poem I opened to was, “After Four Years of Sex”.)

That’s not to say that the book is only about sex, or even more obtusely, sexuality. That would be a disservice and injustice to what Hughes’ has done with the collection. Along those same lines, it’s a misnomer to refer to the book as Hughes’ “sophomore effort.” He’s been at it a long while, picking at poems and producing eloquent elucidations since the early- to mid-80s. A traveler, professor, fisherman and literary critic (he’s a frequent contributer at Harvard Book Review), Hughes knows what he’s doing, knows the world around him, and knows how to shed light on what the poet Paulann Petersen described as “secular epiphanies.”

Yes, sex comes up now and again in Moist Meridian, and one can’t blame Hughes for going there. As a poet, he’s interested and committed to exploring a wide range of human emotions, relationships and frailties, and to bringing these realities together with broad strokes that often take us out to sea, or at least to the shoreline. Were he to avoid sex and sexuality in the process, he’d be overlooking a central part of our human theater. He’s too smart and too curious for that, and all too willing to approach the topic, and many more, with visceral language that aims to entice the reader into the bed each poem makes.

Perhaps fittingly, then, the greater metaphor found throughout the collection doesn’t pertain to the body or our instincts as much as it relates back to the place from where life sprang: the sea (which also serves as the title for the collection’s third section of eight poems).

Throughout “The Sea” section and elsewhere, we find ourselves returning to the water, running to the shore, revisiting nights of coastal fog and mornings of blanched salty whiteness. Beyond the subject matter, Hughes also connects us to the water in his play with form and style, stretching his lines at times out to the margins as if following the natural flow of a wave.

Rather than going for a certain aesthetic, Hughes, when we spoke about the collection, admitted that there’s a natural ebb and flood to the lines themselves.

“I’m not the kind of poet who sits down and says, ‘I’m going to write a sonnet, or I’m going to write a villanelle.’ I really write what I want to say, and then end up looking at the lines later. It seems that I’ve found this motion naturally.”

When lines jut out of stanzas, they resemble our own temporal permeations that sometimes follow balloons out windows when our eyes are told to stay on the spreadsheet in front of us. Or, to stick with the ocean metaphor, Hughes’ lines remind us that a white cap may in fact come tumbling over an otherwise yawning current at any moment.

An unseasoned reader may find his approach challenging; a strict formalist may call it distracting or careless. While neither would rankle Hughes, he’s sensitive enough to want to pull the novice in, if for nothing more than to keep the poems approachable in language and story. Hughes’ goal, in Moist Meridian and elsewhere, is to say something meaningful and humane, and to sound like a real person affected by human emotions. As he did with Men Holding Eggs, he succeeds.

Even his most playful language never loses the reader. In the poem, “Flight”, for instance, Hughes’ narrator seems less than excited to be in the midst of air travel:

**

“And when thunder rattles our ice, and rain
stretches the round corner
of the little window, I shut the beige shade. It’s enough
to tell myself

things
fall. Reminders are desperate.

The invisible captain speaks of seatbelts,
weather and time — that’s fine if we’re coming back to earth.”

**

In the poem, Hughes ruminates on God, death, religion, our own downward drift and demise. Still we’re graced with an “invisible captain” while thunder rattles the ice in the passenger’s diet Coke. For Hughes, arriving at these lines and images is the result of being playful, putting in the hours of work, and, to a degree, getting a little lucky.

“It’s like the Arnold Palmer quote,” Hughes says. “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”

What becomes apparent over the course of the collection is that Hughes is always practicing, constantly needling away at lines, and preparing for more well-earned luck to follow. As much as we get the sense that Hughes is a poet entering his stride, we’re reminded throughout that he’s also one with plenty to say about a number of topics – death ( “My Father’s Old Girlfriend Dies at Seventy” ); suffering ( “What My Wife Would Be Like if She Were Alive” ); relationships ( “Together in the Ice Storm”, “Rooms without You”); politics ( “Skeleton Pirates of America” ); memory ( “Substitute”, “Moving” ); and yes, sex,( “At the Edge of the Known World” ). But sex in Moist Meridian is sex in the most tender sense, brought to the reader by a man with a young man’s playfulness, a willingness to surrender, and the idea that, behind our walls of flesh, a moist, thumping organ — the heart, of course — beats true.

–
Read five poems from Moist Meridian here, and say hello to Henry Hughes here.

–

A personal favorite, from the poem “success factor self-evaluation”:

“Because I didn’t know the cameras were on. 
Because I ran out of pills. 
Nobody would give me more, so I made my own. 
I swallowed erasers.”

You can download the issue as PDF here. It’s a great read and recap of a fantastic undertaking. W.F. Roby and Emily Van Duyne will be curating the next issue.

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During the three-hour workshop, writers will explore the voice that begs to cry out in their work, discuss ways to access and drive a strong, personal style throughout their writing, explore personal history as springboards and much more.

THE FACTS

DATE: Saturday, November 7th

TIME: 2-5 p.m.

PLACE: Writers’ Dojo, 7518 N. Chicago Ave., Portland, OR, 97203

COST: $59

MORE
This workshop is part of the Dojo’s upcoming November workshop series. Register and find out more about this and other upcoming workshops at the Dojo’s events page, or by calling 503-706-0509.

MORE ABOUT SHAINDEL BEERS

Shaindel Beers’ writing, including poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. In January of 2009, Salt Publishing released her first full-length poetry collection, “A Brief History of Time”, which is steeped in personal narrative, internal musings, and the personal longings of a girl reared in a flat country. Beers is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, and serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary.

You can learn more about Beers and her work by visiting her newly launched website.

I’d been in a funk when MISTER SKYLIGHT showed up. A writing funk, sure, but also a reading funk. They feel the same when you boil them down. Nothing inspires, nothing motivates, nothing comes. Every book in the house felt like television fuzz. Not you, MISTER SKYLIGHT. I could tell you were different as soon as I pried you from your Copper Canyon envelope, you with your sepia cover image that spoke of walls and distance, your rusted font and your shot of Ed Skoog on the back cover standing in front of what appeared to be a trailer.

You had poems entitled “During the War”, “Party at the Dump”, and “Memory Loss” right there in the first 14 pages. You had weird sounding stuff later on – “Early Kansas Impressionists,” “Punks Not Dead”, “Pier Life.” MISTER SKYLIGHT, I hadn’t even read a poem yet and I knew you were after my soul.

Then I jumped in.

The truth of this collection is the same truth you’ll find in the nearest skylight. Go stand under the glow. Tell me of the sun, the weather, the clouds. Now tell me of the mites trapped in the screen, the bird shit, the exoskeletons of life. Skoog’s first full-length collection captures and presents the truth of the truth: our under-analyzed, overlooked, often fragile existences on earth.

PLACES, REAL OR OTHERWISE

The collection succeeds, in large part, because of its all-too-real intensity, even as the poet makes no bones about the fact that many of the bones within, while borne of truth, take shape in the imagination. As Skoog mentioned during a recent conversation, “Giving yourself over to the imagination — and I’m not the first person to say this — allows you to express deeper truths than what are factual.

“You begin to approach poems with more liberty with regards to what the ‘I’ is, and what the subject is or isn’t.” Going forward, it allows a writer — Skoog or otherwise — to go deeper, even if a poem, on its surface, may not be about anything.

Many of the poems owe their strength to Skoog’s clever return and reliance on place, right down to times, dates, neighborhoods, streets and rooms. No matter how imaginative and inventive the language becomes, the reader is never lost. Still, Skoog’s places — his Topeka, for instance — are the imagined places of dreams. And not the idle daydreams that help pacify our minds during business meetings or dinner with in-laws. The dreams of MISTER SKYLIGHT are weird midnight visions that flicker along our internal movie screens, the ones that replay your childhood bedroom at an 80% reduction. The furniture is familiar but something is off. Reality becomes temporal, the present is fleeting, and our memories are forever liquid and ever-changing.

“Even when the names of places are accurate, the poetry takes place in the imagination,” Skoog says. “If I say, ‘Topeka’, it’s different than ‘Topeka’ in an essay, and different than taking a picture and saying, ‘This is Topeka.’

“There are a lot of places in the book,” Skoog continues. “Some are places where I’ve lived or visited. Some, like the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, are places I’ve never seen. They’re all imaginary places as far as the poems go. Each place means something different to me, and each has associations that, when you put them into poems, become art associations. They become the aestheticized Topeka, the aestheticized New Orleans.”

UNIVERSAL TIMING

Skoog wrote these poems over the course of a decade and a half, the earliest dating back to around the time he was finishing his M.F.A. at the University of Montana. The bulk of these poems, however, come from an intensely creative period between 2001 and 2006. During this time, Skoog was immersed in the richly creative community of New Orleans, a city the poet credits with having, in his mind, the greatest literary heritage in the country, and our most thriving contemporary literary scene.

“New Orleans was a place to mature, and to do so in an interesting way,” Skoog says. After growing up in Topeka, and living in places like Montana, Southern California and Seattle, Skoog relished the city’s life, art, and color.

“It was different than being off in the suburbs teaching as an adjunct in the middle of nowhere. Aside from growing up and becoming more understanding of the world, New Orleans affected my relationship with poetry in a number of ways.” Skoog found himself as part of a community of “magnificent writers”, each with their very high standards with respect to meaning, music and form.

“They had a lot of different interests, not all of them being of American traditions.”

During this period, Skoog was on the faculty of an arts high school was founded in the ’70s by Ellis Marsalis and other New Orleans musicians. His colleagues helped expand Skoog’s view of poetry and the meaning and role of verse.

“They demanded that you take poetry seriously, which was different from other poetry friends I’d had. For five years I taught with this great group of three other writers. All we did was read, write and talk about poetry, both among ourselves and with some very talented New Orleans kids.”

BOTH SIDES OF THE MASK

Beyond the conversations, study and crafting Skoog experienced in New Orleans, the city itself affected his work in a profound, deliberate sense. As Skoog mentions,

“The nature of the city as being very public and carnivalesque was unbelievably exciting to me,” he says. “But also, the other side of New Orleans, more of the Latin side, is very private and reserved. I found it to be dignified and reflective in ways I’d never encountered. Those two sides of the mask became very important to me, my view of life, and my understanding of how poetry should be written.”

It is from this understanding that the poems in MISTER SKYLIGHT truly begin to open up. For every midnight tramp — the poem “West Coast,” featured in Narrative Magazine, is a fantastic example — Skoog consistently brings us back to a place of reflection. The narrator’s long, drunken night with an old friend concludes with a walk through the present moment as well as past haunts. The poem distills down to the following:

“Our high-minded speculation fades
as we try to find the car, remembering
only that it faced the ship locks,
and when we find it we eat the fries
cold, and let the paper bag be taken
by the wind along the water, and settle
onto its currents, among the rustling gulls.”

While Skoog understands and adheres to the belief that the aim of poetry is serious, he is mindful not to take himself or his role as a poet too seriously. In Recent Changes at Canter’s Deli, a poem in which the narrator, like an earlier version of Skoog, finds himself teaching poetry to affluent teens in Southern California, we read,

“Poetry’s just the form
of unimportance I teach teenagers above L.A.
under slanted windows that kill, by surprise,
the birds we then write about, gathering bonfire
around the small corpses, because it’s cold here.”

This idea of unimportance, similar to giving yourself up to the imagination, proves liberating.

“It’s making a claim for unimportance,” Skoog says. “How wonderful to be unimportant. What liberty and freedom there is to being unimportant in a world where so many things are deemed important.”

Throughout MISTER SKYLIGHT, Skoog does an excellent job guiding readers through the subterranean landscapes he creates. Even when our footing seems unsure, his mastery of narrative and linguistic manipulation — seemingly stretching meter, meaning and rhyme at will — ushers us along. While he is more trickster than sherpa — he may very well duck away and hide on you for a few seconds, and don’t expect him to carry your bags — he keeps us in a close proximity, reminds us that we are all underwater together.

–

Visit the Guest Writer page to read five poems from MISTER SKYLIGHT. Read part 1 of our interview here.

–

Because she’ll ask. She’ll want to know
if the team won. Not that she knows
the difference, but she knows
you want her to ask, and even if
you don’t want her to ask,
you expect she’ll ask because you expect
she expects you to expect her to ask.

So she asks. Did they win. Maybe she knows
by the look in your eyes, but if you’re home alone
listening, not watching, but listening
the way no one listens anymore, and if
you’ve been crying because baseball
sometimes makes you cry – if you’ve been crying
then she might have no idea
whether they’ve won or lost, because crying
goes both ways with baseball – if she sees
you’ve been crying she’ll certainly ask,
after she asks “What’s wrong?”, because
her first thought will be something’s wrong,
he’s on the couch crying, the radio is off,
the dog is snoring and he’s crying in the corner
of the couch, his drink is empty, just the bottom
of bourbon-yellow ice, and his eyes are red.

So she asks, “What’s wrong,” and you say,
“The game, that’s all.” You shake your head
and she shakes hers. “I’m sorry.” But you say,
“Oh no, it’s OK, they won.” “They did?” “Yes.”

“How?” She’ll ask how and you’ll tell her
as she buzzes through the living room
into her closet to strip from her pants and top,
a quick dance into house clothes, the pre-sleep wardrobe
of fleece on top of fleece for the Northwest’s fall.

“Well,” you say – you chink the ice around
in your glass and suck what’s left.

“They were down, you see, down by two,
then by one. They hung around. And in the ninth,
the big closer out for a save, he walks a guy,
hits another, the next guy pops out – there are
two outs now, see, and the leadoff guy…well,
that’s not important. A little guy – later, after the hit
it’ll be all set up for David and Goliath stuff.
But for the time, the little guy, before he turned
into David, took an oh-one pitch to the gap
in right. Both runners dashed home. That’s what
I imagine, at least, a dash – there are no dashes
on radio. Just swings and pops and the announcer
going crazy. All the dirt and dust gets swallowed
in the soft static. And you’re left with the win,
which is enough to make you cry, not because
you missed a thing, but because you sat and listened,
you never saw it coming and you knew all along.”


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