"Play by Play Remote"
I wanted to be Wes Youngblood, the voice
of summer nights, of lazy pop flies, called third strikes.
At nine, suspecting I was not DiMaggio, no matter
that I called my brothers Vince and Dom,
stood in the box so wide it hurt, splintered
a bat knocking rocks into a cottonfield
to perfect a level swing -- still there was radio,
there was Wes Youngblood in his one-man booth,
afloat like an ark in the moth-spangled flood
of ballpark light. A cured hickory baritone
that made each game a new tale
from an old anthology: young heroes, fickle fate.
Home and away, telling it all: the screamer
over third base, chalk puff from the line,
the one-hop throw, the headfirst slide; road games
studio-made but just as true, recorded crowd noise
and teletype rattle in the background, ad-libbed rabbit
on the field once when the wire went dead.
That's what I wanted: to know the whole game,
its spring of secrets, how something remarkable
was always about to happen; to voice it all for them,
all the nine-year-olds longing
to swing hard, smack one over the Piggly-Wiggly sign,
round the bases and shake a dozen hands,
pluck a bouquet of dollar bills from the backstop wire,
and trot out past second base to roam
an outfield as big as the world.
© 2009 MIchael Harty
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