All About Baseball, Partly

Billy, a former dentist,
strolled by the backstop, coming back from first base,
and pretended to be speaking to no one:

"Why are we here?", he asks.
"Why are we really here?"

He does not mean, Why are we playing baseball?
He is playing a different game.
He has been reading, again.
This time it sounds like Martin Heidegger.
Once it was the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Another time, the God Particle,
and polarized light from the Big Bang.

Neither one of us is smart enough to understand what those things are,
but both of us are as curious as kids about what they are.
We ask each other just to ascertain that we are not alone in our ignorance.
When we solve those problems, we are going to turn to the Infield Fly Rule.

It would be wrong to say
that the guys come to Udall Park
to talk about particle physics
or to contemplate the meaning of light, and life.
They come to play baseball.
But shit happens, you know:
protons collide, and cancer eats at you.
The Civil War has to be fought, still,
with surrogate soldiers in self-deceptive uniforms.
We have to pretend that health care is ruining our civilization
while it repairs our knees and hips and kidneys.
Skin cancer patches are everywhere.

Why are we here?

Baseball.
And because there is something lovely and absurd
about sixty, seventy, and eighty-year-olds playing baseball
when they could be home staring at Fox News.
There is no reason to think when you have Fox News.
Baseball makes you think:
What is the count? The score?
Who is supposed to be in the On Deck Circle?
Deep, deep thoughts Fox never explores.

And how is Amos doing? Or Buddy?
Is the cancer moving fast?
Did someone say Sergio's wife was sick?

Why are we here, really?

It isn't just about baseball, is it?

Comments

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