The dry reeds, deep left field, bend basin-ward in the constant hymn
_           _ of Kennedy International. Wasps whirl above rims of Pepsi cans left,
between innings, on a rotting bench as the coach examines his boys,

_           _ bends their ears back and combs through their hair, any bare skin . . .
tuck your pants into your socks. And, later, in the fine light from plastic
_           _ lamps, in a rented studio facing the boulevard, the sound of those flights

still in his ear until he imagines nothing else, nothing but music
_           _ in the arrival and departure of strangers, he’ll hold a mirror to his chest
and part the hair with a tweezer. There are times when he can almost feel

_           _ what isn’t there, or what might be, the mind’s sleight-of-hand, and because
he wouldn’t know where to look next, let me start again. I was in love
_           _ with a woman I thought I could leave. In the end, of course, she left me.

And left for good. And what I felt then isn’t shame, or what I’ve learned
_           _ shame could be, but my whole body ached. Without reason, the doctors said.
It just ached. So I imagined a disease still overlooked, a thief in the bloodstream,

_           _ and I’m thinking of Polly Murray, of Lyme, Connecticut, 1955. I’m thinking
of her first headache, sore throat and fever, the periorbital rash and bleeding.
_           _ And I’m thinking this is about resentment, the doctors’ response, syphilis

perhaps, perhaps lupus, and who could blame her, ferried from the sick
_           _ to the troubled by an expert’s sloppy font. Fish handler’s, German measles.
But it must have been indifference that stayed her, those sweet hours

_           _ when she’d strip before the river and wade out into the current, alone,
the jeweled stars blinking. Or early mornings in bed with her husband,
_           _ how they’d fuck in silence as the children slept far beyond Lyme, and far

beyond their own bodies, if only for an instant. Thirty years to get it all
_           _ down, to separate and divorce. Thirty years to help give name to the disease
poised to bloom across the pale chest of this shortstop, playing in on the grass,

_           _ who spits now into the palm of his glove, a prayer the ball does not find him,
but a moment, as well, his body can record in its brief and almost grace.
_           _ Soon his eyes could blur, his fingers swell. Soon the simplest geometry

might set him off, and his knees will burn. Or the soft voice of his heart
_           _ might stutter and spit, prophesying a long convalescence, the get-well-cards
addressed out-of-state. Then the body’s dominion. Or he’ll return by spring,

somehow quieter, somehow new, giving up soda and chocolate, for Lent,
_           _ he’ll say, though the fine muscles shine past any faith. And who wouldn’t
want it this way? Who doesn’t wish it so? But I remember a boy in eighth

grade who lost an ear on the Interboro when his brother’s Nissan flipped
_           _ at Cypress Hills, the same fool’s turn we’d soon race through to excite our
first girlfriends. He was pinned, I think, in profile to the open sunroof;

_           _ his ear caught, shaved. And if we made fun of him then, if someone
who has long since forgotten first called him Vincent, and he was made
_           _ to carry that name into a strange adulthood the way the young artist carried

his stillborn brother like a pall in that famous signature, we must have been
_           _ afraid. I think we must have been terrified. And if the body’s the form of
prayer and all we believe tethered to it, what then? And the woman

_           _ from Lyme? Or the one who left? Ask the moon. Ask the darker half
of twilight. Or the boys soft tossing between starts of a doubleheader,
_           _ spraying Repel onto their cleats and forearms, and replaying the first

inning error or pair of strikeouts, the dropped fly ball and hit-by-pitch?
_           _ There is no voice in the wind here, no truth in the stalled parkways the wind
moves through, and the boy who lost an ear somewhere in this poem

_           _ must be a man by now, though some things will not change, some things
are absolute, like a truth spoken for the first time, and I can imagine
_           _ him this evening, a look like wonder etched into his face as he stares

again at his own reflection. It’s already late; the last planes pulse and
_           _ broadcast home. And I’m sorry for knowing this, but, each time, nothing
happens. He stares, and nothing happens. And, each time, he can almost

_           _ see what isn’t there, what’s indivisible: a tick on a blade of grass, the body
in negative space.