Tagged: Lisel Mueller
Rainy Day #12 & 35
Hello again baseball fans. This installment finds me in the state capitol of the Keystone State and home of the National Civil War museum–Harrisburg, Pa. (The Three Mile Island nuclear reactors are about 15 minutes up the road as well, but I’m guessing that isn’t a major selling point for most people). All of which is entirely beside the point because I won’t actually get to see any of it, but nice to know it’s there I guess. Since I last checked in I’ve thrown twice, spanning three innings and allowing two runs in somewhat contrasting fashions. The first run scored after the hitter took a mighty hack and hit the ball all of six feet for a single and the other on a mega-blast solo home run that marred an otherwise excellent outing. Pretty much a metaphor for my season to this point–very close but just not quite dialed all the way in. I’m pretty satisfied with the way I threw, so the results will follow shortly I’m sure. The good news though is that as a team we are off to an outstanding start (8-2) and everyone has managed to stay healthy to this point. My main complaint is that with a day game Sunday, a rainout yesterday and a night game today it feels like I have been sitting in my hotel room since time untold. Anyway, have a good Earth Day tomorrow and I’ll send you out with a poem as part of my continuing effort to promote National Poetry Month.
Scenic Route by Lisel Mueller
Someone was always leaving
and never coming back.
The wooden houses wait like old wives
along this road; they are everywhere,
abandoned, leaning, turning gray.
Someone always traded
the lonely beauty
of hemlock and stony lakeshore
for survival, packed up his life
and drove off to the city.
In the yards the apple trees
keep hanging on, but the fruit
grows smaller year by year.
When we come this way again
the trees will have gone wild,
the houses collapsed, not even worth
the human act of breaking in.
Fields will have taken over.
What we will recognize
is the wind, the same fierce wind,
which has no history.
And now for something completely different…
Hello again and for the last time from sunny Arizona. Today was the last day of spring training before breaking camp early on Sunday (as in 4 am early, the Indians don’t mess around) for Akron, Ohio. So my next installment will probably be coming to you live from the Canal Park clubhouse while I wait around to see if they can clear the two feet of snow off the field and get the game in (just kidding… hopefully), so look forward to that. As for actual baseball, I had my last outing of the spring Thursday and went out on a high note with two good innings, capping off a spring completely devoid of any road games–a “perfect spring” if you will.
With the obligatory baseball coverage out of the way, I’m going to devote some time to a completely unrelated topic. As I’m sure literally dozens of people across America are aware, April is National Poetry Month. Now I realize that reading poetry is not exactly at the top of the list of things that most people tend to spend inordinate amounts of free time doing, but it is a rewarding and engaging way to invest some spare time now and then in place of watching television or playing video games. As the great American poet Robert Frost once said, “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat,” and amongst the many books I read over the course of the year the poetry tends to be some of the most impactful and memorable. Not being a poet myself (sad to say), I won’t make an extensive attempt to describe the virtues of poetry, but for those of you who are interested in learning more I’ll give you a list of some of my poetic favorites that would provide a great starting point. I would also direct you to the website for the Academy of American Poets at poets.org, where you can find information about poets and poetry, get information on events in your area, and sign up for the poem-a-day feature to get a poem from an American poet delivered to your email inbox everyday (one of the few emails I look forward to reading on a daily basis). Enjoy.
I first stumbled across Stephen Dunn about two years ago and he his books have quickly become some of my favorite reading material. His best known book is Different Hours which won the Pulitzer prize for poetry, and he has a number of other excellent books including Everything Else in the World, Between Angels, and what is probably my favorite collection of poems–The Insistence of Beauty.
Other favorites:
Time and Materials, by Robert Hass
Repair, by C.K. Williams
Alive Together, by Lisel Mueller
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
Radio, Radio, by Ben Doyle
The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot
Simple Language, by Jennifer Barone
Failure, by Philip Schultz
Floating City, Anne Pierson Wiese
Wagner's Compositions 