Ringless

Natan Last

Poet, polymath, immigration expert and friend of Works Progress Natan Last is fresh off an excellent New Yorker poem that unfortunately belittles the Mets. Luckily we have him writing on baseball again, and there’s no Yankee propaganda in this special-edition poem.

Natan is also the author of Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle, which is out now and makes a game-winning Christmas present.

Until spring training,

The Editors

Ringless

A coach flaps his arms like a snow angel, an A on his helmet. I went

Gloveless, a better grip on the Louisville slugger

Whose mottle & grain are a capsule in advance of the forest,

        Treelines rising for the Wave with prehistoric sluggishness.

My callused palms have never held an axe, but how different

.

Could it be? Pinched epidermis, threat of outdoors, striped uniform, a home.

Mom unpins the traced-hand turkey from the fridge to make a point about growth.

When I give a fist, my dad high-fives it. Paper beats rock, he coaches—uch, another writer.

        Our fam steals signs at trailheads now brambled over & calls them heirlooms:

4 MILE LOOP, silhouette with walking stick. That’s grandpa for you.

.

We crossed ourselves as the Single A affiliate dipped for the west coast,

Said goodbye skywritten ads over Brighton, tipped our caps to the mermaids’ vanishing Y’s.

Once we saw a botched proposal on the Jumbotron. Like the Wave,

        We stood & we sat. Me? I’d’ve done branches, traced WILL YOU

On the Fort Tilden inlet, abused the plausible deniability of tides. A— & A—

.

Forever, carved on a tree ‘til deforestation, on a desk ‘til the school is repossessed. Coach says

Can’t wear rings if you pitch, the batter could think it’s a sun.

Baseball, like a forest, is the everywhere game: down in the lineup.

        I dreamed I was lumberjack strong, snapped oaks like pencils,

Beheld the always concentric O’s to prove, at scale, shock is the most loyal fandom.

.

I picture the thwarted groom, staunch as a Douglas fir as he’s frisked

By ballpark security for the ring—the annulus. That night my favorite player

Went O for four, went down swinging in his last at-bat & angrily snapped

        The Louisville slugger, in half, on one knee.

That wood that before it was dead was perfect.

-30-

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NATAN LAST is a writer and immigration policy advocate. He writes bimonthly crosswords for The New Yorker. His essays, poetry, and academic research appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Drift, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Narrative, and elsewhere. He has worked for the UN, the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, the International Rescue Committee, and as an advisor to the federal government on refugee resettlement. He lives in his native Brooklyn.