BORGES SWINGS AWAY

“He can hear, if he shuts out the crowd,

The pitcher breathing sixty feet away.”

from “Borges at the Bat”

In honor of the start of the 2021 Major League Baseball season tomorrow, April 1, I offer my poem “Borges at the Bat” below. A sestina from Claims of Home, my second book of poetry, it swipes its title and dramatic situation from “Casey at the Bat,” one of the most memorable—and memorizable—poems in the American canon. (My two sons can vouch for my preference for “Casey” as a bedtime yarn.) The outcome of my poem is much different from that of its ancestor, however.

About my casting of Jorge Luis Borges in the lead role, I can only say that I regard the great Argentine’s blindness to be symbolic of his great imaginative powers. Forced to turn inward, Borges trained his vision on the entirety of time and space. He was possessed of a second sight that would indeed make him a prodigious hitter, as Ted Williams, possessed of better than 20-20 vision, well knew. I dress the poet in pinstripes because that is the garb of the New York Yankees, a team of Olympian grandeur beloved by me since the age of eight. Play ball! 

David M. Katz

Borges at the Bat    

The blind author advances to the plate.
He can hear, if he shuts out the crowd,
The pitcher breathing sixty feet away:
The sound of breath is how he measures men.
They plot the pace and rhythm out together.
The hurler nods in empathy. Ball one.

The late September day contracts to one
Astonishment: the blind man, near the plate,
Taking a practice cut, piecing together
The fragmentary silences of the crowd,
Spitting, toeing the dirt, sensing other men.
He hears the air splitting as he swings away.

The two refuse to give their intentions away,
Surrender ground with a count of one and one.
They might well be a father and son, these men
Who strive for space across a gleaming plate,
The rookie and the writer transfixing the crowd.
Bright eyes, blank eyes, ten thousand eyes together.

The kid gathers his brightest days together
Like an all-star team. Old Borges stays away
From the pitch, misreading signals from the crowd.
They inhale, too late, on a high, hard one
Sliced down the living center of the plate.
The count's now one and two, and these two men

Bear scant resemblance to the other men.
The game's a place where strangers come together.
The umpire contemplates a perfect plate
Out of Plato, bends to whisk the dirt away
With a tiny brush. The hitter wears the number one
On his pinstriped shirt to educate the crowd. 

Suddenly, it's night. Borges disdains the crowd,
Hears hardly a hush from the mouths of men.
The silence sets him free to hit like one
Beyond sense. The ball and bat work together
With certain knowledge. The horsehide soars away
Toward the moon: a home beyond the plate.

Home run. The crowd advances to the stairway.
But some, together near the star-struck plate,
Wonder where the two unlikely men have gone.

 PHOTO CREDIT: "Casey at the Bat" by Brett Kiger is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.