Out of the Park

Hello, friends. I signed off here back in late April and haven’t posted a thing for all you lovely people to read since. There have even been some new subscribers during this period. Welcome, and apologies that you’ve had to wait this long to hear from me.

My son graduated from college last spring, an event that marked the beginning of this period of kids at home, or hithering and thithering between here and a college apartment until the lease was up; a time of summer concerts, baseball games, sand in the mudroom, sand in the car, sand in the lint trap of the dryer, sand pretty much everywhere; a season of gardening (when it wasn’t raining) and watering (once the rain stopped all together).

There have been angsty periods, the air thick with stress over another school year, a post-college job search. But now that new school year is nearly here and my son starts his first post-college job next week. The hard stop is coming. The house will be quiet, there will be many fewer shoes in the mudroom, their beds will stay made for weeks at a time. Pillows plumped on the couch will no longer be strewn on the floor the next time I walk through the room, and we’ll stop running out of spoons each day.

It will be a little sad, but then we’ll all get busy. We’ll have new stories to share on FaceTime calls and new jokes for the group chat. And soon we’ll bid farewell to baseball for another year. The Red Sox will keep playing until the end of September, but the final home stand for our beloved Portland Sea Dogs is fast approaching.

So here’s a poem for the end of summer, for all the keepers of those nests that may not actually be empty, but feel a lot bigger and quieter all of a sudden, and for the end of the season of thrilling wins and crushing losses, of “Take me Out to the Ball Game” and “Sweet Caroline,” of stolen bases, double plays, and home runs. September will always be my favorite month, with its new notebooks and freshly sharpened pencils. But first we must get through August, the month of goodbyes.

Out of the Park
Because you love baseball
so much, I sometimes
imagine when you leave
that you are the home run
we all hoped for, the high point
in a game that needed a hero
soaring like a blown kiss
over the wall that proved too high
for the other kisses to clear
But this one flies away
an endearment propelled
by an exuberant swing
We sit in the stands
the whole world holding
it's breath between
the crack of the bat
and the vanishing
of the ball out of the park
when we leap to our feet
and cheer, clapping
our hands until they sting
And in my imagining
this ball does not land
along the grassy edge
of the highway or roll
forgotten down a dusty channel
to a dry culvert under the road
but continues on soaring
its whistle a beautiful note
held over Broadway
through the great arch
in St. Louis, it sails over
the grand canyon, harmonizing
with the updrafts, then
spans the Pacific Ocean
and coasts over the great wall
dipping for a moment
into a pentatonic scale
and then rising once more
over the opera houses of Europe
flying low over the chilly Atlantic
to feel the spray on its face
and arrives home again
bouncing gently on the
springy grass of the infield
and rolling, breathless
and beaming and
smelling of sea water
to the edge of the mound
ready for the next wind-up
the next swing, the next song

In preparation for returning to this space, I’ve done some paring down of my subscriptions and have cut way back on the number of folks I follow here. This is always hard. The last thing I want to do is lose touch with people whose work I have enjoyed reading, or whose posts on Notes have led me to a new writer. But time is limited and Notes is a devourer of time. I will say that, at least for now, my Notes feed does feel a bit more spare, a bit less clogged with memes and nonsense and I’ve found my way to some really wonderful words there. Here are links to a few of them:

• This beautiful essay by Jenna Park about the winding down of summer gave me such a sense of community with other parents of grown kids

• This gorgeous poem by Julia Bedell struck the perfect note for me in this nostalgic season

• And I adored this poem by Anna Maija which touched on motherhood and midlife. Perimenopause may not sound poetic, but, oh my goodness, this poem is a thing of beauty.

IRL, I was handed a small handmade poetry zine by a friend and was delighted to learn that it began its life in England.

It’s off again on another leg of its journey. Who knows where it will turn up. You can read all about Martin Smith’s “Take This With You & Leave It Somewhere Else” project here:

And finally, a couple of announcements…

• I had a poem accepted for publication in the local Sunday paper! You can read it here in the Deep Water column (gift link), a collaboration between the Maine Sunday Telegram and MWPA (Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance).

• And the Public Domain Poetry Project will be returning for its second installment. Once I get settled into September I’ll choose a poem from the list I’ve been making and we’ll begin writing poems using each line from the poem as a prompt, one per week. To learn more about it and read some of the poems written last time around, start here.

Thanks for reading, everyone!

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