Batterymates
At
73, I have long since given up
Soccer
and basketball with him,
So
we have devised a new game,
My
grandson and I,
To
play in the back yard on afternoons
Thick
with the warmth of late spring.
I
am the pitcher,
He
the rest of our baseball team.
We
toss the ball back and forth,
Field
grounders and pop flies,
Each
catch an out.
Sometimes
the other guys reach base,
An
errant throw skittering
Into
the monkey grass, hidden by
Fallen
azalea blooms.
My
teammate, playing deep,
Somewhere
between childhood and
Adolescence,
applies tags to phantom foes
As
they foolishly try to stretch a hit.
Our
team scores a run
Each
time we retire the side.
We
have never lost.
Interview
TSTmpj: America, summer, and baseball. (Especially
for international readers) what is your take on baseball and the American
psyche?
Robert
Demaree: Baseball, much more than other
sports, holds mythic properties for Americans, and novels such as Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris and
Bernard Malamud’s The Natural find in
our ‘national pastime’ a metaphor for our national life: effort and dedication
pay off, but not always; you don’t have to be seven feet tall or weigh 300
pounds; you can come from behind in the bottom of the ninth with a walk-off
homer, and withal a poignancy, the outskirts of sorrow.
Poets
from Marianne Moore to Donald Hall have likewise used the details of the game
for setting and theme.
The
place of baseball in the American psyche depends on a kind of sociocultural
memory. Many of us look back fondly on afternoon games in rust belt cities, how
even small cities and towns would have a minor league team, or an amateur team
with the name of the town on flannel shirts.
Listen
to a baseball broadcast on a summer night: not frenetic, like basketball or ice
hockey, but the steady rise and fall of the play-by-play and banter, the low
rhythmic hum of the game in the background, like cicadas (no batter, no batter, no batter), good company, comfortable like an
old infielder’s glove, well oiled, broken in.
*
TSTmpj: I love the sense of, in a very deep way, the
young and the old being equals. This wisdom prompts me to ask: what
is "loss" in life for you, in the context of age?
Robert
Demaree: The setting of “Batterymates”
is not, strictly speaking, baseball but one of those fantasy games that
baseball inspires. It had not occurred to me before this interview that there
might be a connection between the last line (“We have never lost.”) and what I
described in another poem as “the abiding presence of loss.” The two people in
the poem are indeed equals—they are teammates—and the loss the narrator fears
is that his teammate may in time outgrow the game; that, and, of course, the
encroaching of years: I do not feel them yet but suspect they are out there
somewhere.
*
TSTmpj: How has your connection with nature changed
as you've gotten older?
Robert
Demaree: Growing older—retirement—has
offered more time for writing, which in turn has quickened an awareness of
nature, much of it related to the four months of the year we spend on a small
lake in New Hampshire. I have poet friends who write beautifully and
knowledgeably about nature, something that does not come naturally to me, if
you will. So while I feel a strong acquired kinship with both goldfinch and
grackle, I have to say that I value the fallen azalea bloom not so much for its
own beauty and sadness, but rather as the hiding place of an errant throw.
Bio Note
Robert Demaree is a retired educator who's authored four
collections, including Mileposts (2009). He has had over 650
poems individually published.
