Its the birthday of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, agitator, poet, publisher, proprietor of San Franciscos City Lights Book Store. Its also coming up on baseball season. So lets honor both with one of my favorite Ferlinghetti poems: Baseball Canto Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn, reading Ezra Pound, and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto and demolish the barbarian invaders. When the San Francisco Giants take the field and everybody stands up for the National Anthem, with some Irish tenors voice piped over the loudspeakers, with all the players struck dead in their places and the white umpires like Irish cops in their black suits and little black caps pressed over their hearts, Standing straight and still like at some funeral of a blarney bartender, and all facing east, as if expecting some Great White Hope or the Founding Fathers to appear on the horizon like 1066 or 1776. But Willie Mays appears instead, in the bottom of the first, and a roar goes up as he clouts the first one into the sun and takes off, like a footrunner from Thebes. The ball is lost in the sun and maidens wail after him as he keeps running through the Anglo-Saxon epic. And Tito Fuentes comes up looking like a bullfighter in his tight pants and small pointy shoes. And the right field bleechers go mad with Chicanos and blacks and Brooklyn beer-drinkers, Tito! Sock it to him, sweet Tito! And sweet Tito puts his foot in the bucket and smacks one that dont come back at all, and flees around the bases like hes escaping from the United Fruit Company. As the gringo dollar beats out the pound. And sweet Tito beats it out like hes beating out usury, not to mention fascism and anti-semitism. And Juan Marichal comes up, and the Chicano bleechers go loco again, as Juan belts the first ball out of sight, and rounds first and keeps going and rounds second and rounds third, and keeps going and hits paydirt to the roars of the grungy populace. As some nut presses the backstage panic button for the tape-recorded National Anthem again, to save the situation. But it dont stop nobody this time, in their revolution round the loaded white bases, in this last of the great Anglo-Saxon epics, in the territorio libre of Baseball.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 19:27:29 +0000
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