Sweet Safety of Your Third Base
They make friends well before
Crepuscule
On the swing-sets the day before
Thanksgiving;
And they make their slight penumbra over
The lake
That you have forgotten,
The lake that will never be yours again because
You lived too close to it
To be mindful of how important it was,
Even though men had dug:
Like bouquets they sold in the aisle of your
Check out line,
Like the celebrities grinning there,
What I have always tried to become, digging up
Pretty things from the roots of
Suburban yards whose traffics aren��t at home,
And the sky is a rosy bowl
Of drying flowers where the airplanes hover
Like the condiments of many-windowed wasps,
Silver and husked,
Just as diminutive as you were to me
All through college
Until you rose to the surface again and I saw your
Eyes and thus without another thought
Gathered up in the background queue of
Your bull pen and waited for those
Men who superceded me in your heart to
Prove unfaithful,
To swing empty love so that I might have a chance
Of hitting a grand slam through your house of
Areolas and cards,
Or at least burning my legs into the loci of sweet
Safety of your third base.
Poem by Obert Rorabeck
