Untranslatable

By Bob Stanley

One October afternoon
standing on the knoll above the tetherball poles
the sixth grade guys huddled together
eager to dispel the fifth-grade rumor
that the World Series was over
and the Giants had lost.
Expecting one more miracle
obscured in transistor static
we heard it was true: final score one-zero.

The next April Grandpa Joe sent me a poem from Paris –
some American missed the crack of the bat
the dust - the tension
and the casual inattention that turns to a roar
without warning - untranslatable.

Each season would go by
and win or lose, we’d stand with the black and orange

That last season
when cancer was coming at him like an
inside pitch, he called
hoping we could go to the game
as he took me twenty years before to the
night game Mays won off Warren Spahn in sixteen:
one-zero
but by then I was asleep in his arms.

This time it was Dwight Gooden and the Mets
but I couldn’t make it –
you took the bus out there by yourself
it went extra innings again.

Can that many years go by
and still the zero be on the scoreboard?
The peaks and valleys of a single game
are easily described in a box-score
but extra innings
well, that’s just poetry.