Poet's Choice

Thirty-five years of warmups.

Like glancing down at the scorecard

in your lap for half a second

and when you look up it's done--

a long fly ball, moonlike,

into the night

over the fence,

way out of reach.

The poet is Lynn Rigney Schott, whose father, Bill Rigney, was a major league player and manager. I found her poem in Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball .

I like the candid, unfussy way the baseball metaphors arrive: half the season for the midpoint of life at 35, warmups and the oiled glove for preparations not yet fulfilled. Also appealing is the notion of the scorecard as a distraction from what's really important. On another card is the presiding figure of Bill Rigney, "eyes riveted" and "single-minded." Along with her admiration for him, Schott also implies that for the poet's work one must be not only "single-minded" but many-minded: aware of the bluebirds and the desk and the baseball and the rain and the New York Giants. Maybe all of those are embodied in the final image of a fly ball as the tide-pulling, mysterious moon, represented traditionally by Diana the hunter. That goddess is a kind of single-minded athlete, and in her restless seeking a many-minded writer as well.

(Lynn Rigney Schott's poem "Spring Training" can be found in "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball." Faber and Faber. Copyright © 1993 by Elinor Nauen.)