FOR
THE LOST BOYS (sample
selections)
The Anthropology of Little League Baseball
Black Pattern on a Mocha Ground
Sky
Dun Aengus
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF LITTLE LEAGUE BASEBALL
The styles of neophyte umpires alone merit
A monograph from a small distinguished press,
This one’s elaborate Kung-Fu-inflected step
Twist, plunge, and recoil—“YROUT!”—
With the sound of wind punched out of bagpipes, or
The stately, vulnerable posturing of last week’s ump
As he dropped from the waist to sweep home plate
With the same six precisely parallel brusque strokes.
A field-seasoned prof with a team of grad interns
Might well forego that sub-Saharan nomadic tribe
To lurk these stands, scribbling notes, convening
Each evening over the beverage favored by locals
To discuss the genres and signatures of spitting
Among rural American ten-year-old boys—girls
Now too—back pockets bulging with pouches
Of shredded pink bubblegum “chew.” They might devise
A special calligraphy to note the choreography
Of sliding, the balletics of snag and tag, and especially
The beautiful contortions of pitchers’ windups: the little
Prayer over the ball, the shock-corded limbs
Arcanely folded, unsprung with unlikely grace.
One intern adept in confessional interviews,
Practiced in native dialect and vernacular, will sit
Among the parents, the grandparents, the step-parents,
And ask, “So, which one’s yours?”, which, he knows,
Will unfold stories of fathers, the early victories
That ease the world’s disregard, the healing rites
Of eternal seasonal return, the allegiance we pledge
To sportsmanship, as long as we’re winning, team spirit
Plus the free-agent slinging greased-lightning sliders.
One whimsical ethnographer may linger
In stands emptied of all but wrappers and cups
And witness the invisible cloud that hovers
Above the arc-lit diamond, the collective
Night-cherished fantasy of playing in the Majors,
Which only a few seasons can sustain.
BLACK PATTERN ON A MOCHA GROUND
If not “quick as a snake,” then quick enough
I bring the brick’s end down
On his head in one tamping motion. But that
Cliché is wrong: snakes take life
Slowly, depending more on camouflage,
The failed perception of others, than speed.
Bud, a big black man whose bad heart
Sent bolts down his arm, told me
The thing scared him most in Nam
Wasn’t “gooks or bombs” but a cobra,
Hood flared, reared belt-high,
Parting a column of soldiers on a dusty road
Faster than a man could run. Bud
Lashed the air with his arm to show me,
The arm that later that summer,
Laying bricks, struck his heart.
There is a distinction between aggression
And self-defense we fail to grant
To snakes. Lost on Bud, it was not
Lost on the Vietcong. A summer before,
The war raging beyond the edges of my
Perception, I hiked Chilhowie Mountain,
Stopping to eat a half-pack of Fig Newtons
In the unmanned fire tower on top.
In all directions, the green canopy,
Beneath which, hiking down, I caught
An ancient black snake and fed him
Into the sleeve of my shirt. I tell you,
All the clichés are wrong.
Smooth and dry as talcum,
He wound around my heart three times,
And, further down the slope, lent me
Nerve to trap an arm-thick rattler
With a forked stick, slide my hand
Up behind the flanges of its skull, and carry it—
Mouth sprung—to the nature center’s terrarium.
I am not a snake, nor am I a Vietcong.
Even so, neither can I understand
The failed perception by which
My neighbor, or his teenage son,
Swerved to hit or did not swerve
To miss the snake crossing our road.
His perfect tube is ruptured: a yellow
Loop of intestine hangs out,
A staggered pattern of obsidian chips
Floats the mocha ripples on his back,
And I, coils around my heart,