On First Looking Into Mazeroski’s Homer
Jim Crenner
Much have I traveled through the air of late,
and sat for hours in the anesthetic, fungible
decors of airport lounges and hospital waiting-rooms,
while my grown son nearly died, and then did not.
Jet-speed and stress had so misconnected my brain
by the time the crisis ended, that when Kate, his
mother, called long-distance for the latest word,
I lost the quarter-century since our divorce,
and slid into unseemly intimacy with the ghost
of her voice, cried unguardedly along with her,
and half-expected momentarily to find myself
ungluing as before within the old delirium
of her arms. And the old pain came back, too.
And so it was with wonder and relief that I
beheld, on hanging up, my current life around me
like another planet! One image from that past
hung on, though: a quonset hut in Iowa City,
October, 1960, interior shot with sloping walls,
me scribbling in a chair, my young wife cooking,
and a cheap white plastic A.M. radio narrating
solemnly the action of the last game of the Series.
Oh, we had joked about it, about whether a fan
of those patrician Yankees could possibly find
true happiness with a Pirates guy, but who
could have predicted that before our very first
anniversary was in the record book, the little
Pittsburgh Poles and the mighty Robber-Barons
would be locked in mortal struggle for the World
Championship? But here it was: seventh game,
last of the ninth, score-tied, bases loaded, Maz
at the plate, and Kate and I both working hard at
looking nonchalant. And when the Pittsburgh crowd
went nuts, Kate picked up the radio and slammed it
on the stove as Maz's liner cannoned off the score-
board; static barked; plastic flew; sparks leapt; and
it went dead. I looked up from the prim sestina
I was working on, too young to know where the real
poem was. She trying hard to smile and I trying not
to, as the metal-tasting smoke hung motionless between
us, we looked silently at one another, without surmise,
for three children and thirteen sudden years.
