Rapture & The Big Bam

Transported by trifles these soupy days – bright-blooming
paprika yarrow, that bagpiped out-of-tune Auld Lang Syne
tumbling over bone-dry hills, my son trembling with bliss

& dread as he plummets down the frog-slide’s tongue –
I grow wary of my own whirligig bouts of delight
when I find myself sideswiped by a ball of electrical tape

made, the plaque claims, by Babe Ruth at St. Mary’s School for Boys.
Needless to say, who cares? Why pause for even a moment
before this misshapen chotchka on a Plexiglas shelf? Relic-like,

under a hard light’s glare, beside Cobb’s sharpened cleats
& Clemente’s jersey from such & such a game, it was a wad
of nothing, really, a lopsided sphere most likely never used

for a game or even shagging flies & is only one more piece
of the past’s lumpish fruit turned artifact behind alarmed glass.
And still, why pretend the wondrous & the useless weren’t the same

all along? The meaningless, the miraculous – who are we to say?
Picture this tight bundle sailing past each backpedaling boy
history swallowed whole, long past the orphanage wall-notch

marking Brother Mathias’s furthest shot, past that rusted boiler
& the harbor’s rotting hulls, & past now even what legend will allow
as it soars beyond his Pigtown two-room shack with its avalanche

of bottles & chairs & his sauced-up father prowling again, back
from a day of door-to-door lies about his worthless lightning rods,
flames, guarantees, God’s wrath. Or at least this is how

it might have seemed. Rapture, raptura: to carry away
with joy; earlier: to kidnap, rape, although for better or worse
in this simmer of pleasure no one’s talking etymology here.

In the last year Ruth played for the Sox, he pummeled
a slider off Columbia George for the longest homerun ever hit.
With ease. Without much of anything but a body-thrashing stroke

during spring training when, as if it were possible, all of this
means even less. Billy Sunday, ex-right-fielder-turned-preacher-ablaze,
taking a break from bellowing about the Devil’s spitballs

& ways to head-butt sin, watched that ball beeline for even more
empty sky & for as long as this fast-winging shape remains
aloft, & even for a bit longer still, it’s the only grace

Sunday or anyone could feel, buoying them beyond the far wall
& revival tent pitched across the field, the bay’s abandoned shipyards,
all the dead that year from flu. Or is that too much to presume?

Even if perfection here means a split-second thwack & all
the countless ways to be held in thrall are both our shame & luck,
it matters little just now. I tell you no one could help their joy.