Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, April 23, 2006

Ever since the Greek poet Pindar wrote his odes celebrating the original Olympic athletes, sports have been associated with the passing of time, the brevity of life. Baseball seems to invite meditations on time all the more because, as has often been observed, it is the sport without a clock: In theory, the extra innings are infinite -- but not really. (Though non-fans have been known to feel that the games go on forever.)

Here is a poem that looks at sports and time, in particular baseball and time, from an unusual perspective:

Spring Training

The last of the birds has returned --

the bluebird, shy and flashy.

The bees carry fat baskets of pollen

from the alders around the pond.

The wasps in the attic venture downstairs,

where they congregate on warm windowpanes.

Every few days it rains.

This is my thirty-fifth spring;

still I am a novice at my work,

confused and frightened and angry.

Unlike me, the buds do not hesitate,

the hills are confident they will be

perfectly reflected

in the glass of the river.

I oiled my glove yesterday.

Half the season is over.

When will I be ready?

On my desk sits a black-and-white postcard picture

of my father -- skinny, determined,

in a New York Giants uniform --

ears protruding, eyes riveted.

Handsome, single-minded, he looks ready.

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.)