So I missed a couple days of this. I was up in Milwaukee and not really around the internet very much, and returned and had to take a sick day. It won’t happen again. Today’s poem is by B.H. Fairchild, a very vivid poet who writes largely about experiences of growing up and working deep in the rural Midwest. This one is called “Moses Yellowhorse is Throwing Water Ballons from the Hotel Roosevelt,” from his book Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest. Who doesn’t love a poem about baseball?
Moses Yellowhorse is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt
The combed lawn of the Villa Carlotta
cools the bare feet of my aesthetic friend
cooing Beautiful, so beautiful, a dream …
beneath the fat leaves of catalpa trees,
and my Marxist friend—ironic, mordant—
groans, Ah, yes, indeed, how beautifully
the rich lie down upon the backs of the poor,
but I am somewhere else, an empty field
near Black Bear Creek in western Oklahoma,
brought their by that ancient word, dream,
my father saying, you had the dream, Horse,
and two men toss a baseball back and forth
as the sun dissolves behind the pearl-grey strands
of a cirrus and the frayed, flaming branches
along the creek so that the men, too, seem
to be on fire, and the other one, a tall Pawnee
named Moses Yellowhorse, drops his glove,
But I wasn’t a man there, and there, I know,
is Pittsburgh, and man means something more
like human, for as a boy I had heard
this story many times, beginning, always,
He was the fastest I ever caught, the fastest,
I think, there ever was, and I was stunned
because for a boy in America, to be the fastest
was to be a god, and now my father
and his brothers move behind a scrim
of dust in a fallow wheat field, a blanket
stretched between two posts to make a backstop,
a stand of maize to mark the outfield wall,
while their father watches, If an Indian
can make it, then by god so can they,
and so it goes, this story of failure
in America: Icarus unwarned,
strapped with his father’s wings, my father
one winter morning patches the drive line
of an old Ford tractor with a strand
of baling wire, blood popping out along
his knuckles, and then in fury turning
to his father, I’m not good enough,
I’ll never get there, and I’m sorry,
I’m goddamned sorry, while Moses Yellowhorse
is drunk again and throwing water balloons
from the Hotel Roosevelt because now
he is “Chief” Yellowhorse, and even though
in a feat of almost angelic beauty
he struck out Gehrig, Ruth, and Lazzeri
with nine straight heaters, something isn’t right,
so one day he throws a headball at Ty Cobb,
then tells my father, He was an Indian-hater,
even his teammates smiled, and now, trying
to explain this to my friends, it occurs to me
that, unlike the Villa Carlotta, baseball is
a question of neither beauty nor politics
but rather mythology, the collective dream,
the old dream, of men becoming gods
or at the very least, as they remove
their wings, being recognized as men.
