What We Lose
I.
Pedro Martinez
was the greatest pitcher
who ever lived. His fingers were long and nimble
and could twist pitches like weather patterns.
For five years he was
a beautiful product of
statistics and circumstance.
His hands were such that he could launch ships
with a casual flick,
and send them reeling graceful onto the
ocean.
And you should have seen him play the piano,
with those hands.
II.
You could never be a model,
never could and never should be.
Too much of you falls away in your
deconstructive smile.
We are most powerful when we are alone, hearing
the betrayals of our countries to the maps of our bodies,
sweat and bile in the valleys of our veins,
the eternal wars of knobble-knees
and pale, thin tributaries of hands.
And distance has a stronger flavor
than any mud of your birthplace,
and you will drink
so many kilometers of its alcohol.
III.
And Pedro Martinez was amazing in bed,
though only half as gorgeous as he was on the mound.
But one day he missed, hit himself with a finger,
and romance is only a product of
statistics and circumstance,
and age proves us all to be ships without harbors.
Betrayals
Pedro Martinez once said
that when he looked into the mirror
he saw only a collection of parts,
loosely connected in a large, hanging framework,
a stalled construction project.
Sometimes I can see what he means.
A person under scrutiny
divides into countries, arms, legs, hair
sectioned off with fences at their borders.
But when the dark topples over us
my fingers run from
slick bricks of teeth to high cheek domes,
to soft bent spires of black hair.
It all blends together,
peaks and crevasses, dry deserts of foreheads,
eyes that flutter with weather patterns
and lips that shake,
the soft vibrations of earthquakes,
your body warm and flowing like oceans.
And though Pedro saw little in the mirror,
when he moved on the mound with perfect precision
even his changeup could topple buildings,
and occasionally did, leaving Fenway
little more than
a great pile of rubble
on the ground.
Why We Write
Unfortunately there are no numbers
for brown and wide and slim,
if there were I would have
written them down already,
made some calculations, solved
for your eyes and then
canceled them.
I would hope that perhaps by perfecting
the calculations of their conveyance I could
make memory zero and
reduce beauty to something less than fractions.
And yesterday I felt lonely
as usual so I went into the cold
and talked to Pedro Martinez
and he told me all about
what it was for him to pitch.
I listened, as the snow
fell like shredded poems past the lights
of the diamond only to
muddy the ground as cold rain.
He told me that
to him, pitching meant to look
into his own fields and discover
what his rival expected, and then
to whip his arm with the irrevocable
and undeniable certitude
of numbers.
And in this way introspection
becomes extroversion, and
yesterday I held you in the dark,
the layers of statistics typed out,
weaving and piling into
a hopeless calculation,
a helpless confession,
or even
just maybe
a poem
snowing over.
Better Places
Sometimes I enjoy
flying to Shea Stadium simply to
sit down and chat
with Pedro Martinez.
His accent lilts along
with the waves of his Republic
and Jose Reyes occasionally
brings coffee, though Pedro
never has any.
"I like coffee, sometimes," he always says,
"but I don’t feel like it now."
One time I asked
what it was like, for him,
to pitch, if it felt
like something divine.
He scoffed. "I doubt God
has anything to do
with my pitching," he said,
"and if he did, then
I’m a little worried
about his priorities."
I swill coffee
like cheap beer, sometimes,
and when I’m around him I tend to
chatter incessantly,
my mouth echoing
the slow Portland drizzles
in which I was born. Sometimes
he finds it hard
to understand me,
my voice is low, I mumble
a lot, and it can seem
the shores of his speech are trying
to cut through the rain.
"Don’t worry," he laughs,
whenever I apologize.
"You think too much.
You need to...let go.
Use your worries in better places."
Over a game of Halo 3
I ask him for advice with
some of my problems, again
he laughs. "Look at me," he says,
"I began single and poor,
I ended married and rich.
I bought my mother a house.
You start out in the Dominican,
you end in New York City,
it doesn’t matter
where you were in between."
Then he thinks.
"Except, perhaps, when I pitch,"
he says.
"When I pitch everything matters.
It’s like I’m standing in the ocean."
And I think of the rain.
"And feeling the water sway."
Words
At D-Day our soldiers were ripped down like curtains,
the beaches began the mouth of a river of bile,
and we barely won, and would have lost,
but for the grace of Pedro Martinez.
He stood at the top of a hill
and pelted baseballs at the Germans
and when there were no more he switched to rock slabs,
and their jagged edges cracked skulls, and burst eyes.
And this is a vengeful Pedro Martinez,
even a 72-year-old bench coach for the Yankees
is thrown down in fury if he attempts to challenge
the subtlety of Pedro's intentions.
In Gethsemane, which was, surprisingly,
a baseball field, Pedro Martinez urged Our Lord to
"be not scared of the Romans, Yeshua,
for their curveball could never match yours."
And the next day he started for Boston,
retired the first twenty-seven to bat but
the Red Sox never could score a run,
and the first batter of the tenth hit a double.
"So you see I never was perfect," he says,
"I painted my pitches in unhittable places,
was as graceful as the greatest artist at work,
but I never could get the perfect game."
And when Pedro was born he spoke with God
and God said, "Hey Pedro, if you work really hard
I bet you could become a really good pitcher."
And Pedro said, "Okay, if I can buy my mother a house."
And then God said to me, "Hey Andy,
if you write a series of poems about Pedro
perhaps you might find the right person to read them."
And I said "Fuck you, God, I'm agnostic.
"And words are lies, don't you know?
Comparison means one is comparable.
Love becomes simply a product of language.
Besides, I don't know shit about Pedro."
"There's Wikipedia," said God, "And Baseball-Reference.com,
and YouTube might have some old videos.
And if that doesn't work, then make it up.
I'm sorry, but that's just the curse of your art, boy.
"Language is all you have."