Maddux Listens to the Game on Tape

As one might expect, more
than anything, he

listens. Recalls the mound
behind his eyes,

neck tilted slightly
and mouth ajar.

He floats back to hear
what caught the black,

for the scene between
himself and the catcher:

a shiver of light
his arm shuffles through.

When Uncle Mo spins,
the sigh of a career

near done, he with Wrigley,
the crowd a choir

on the tape catching,
spooling, and righting
itself again.
 
 
Listening for Bob Uecker

My father thinks you can find
a signal from anywhere—

a Mets game in Cincinnati,
the Reds in Tennessee.

I tell him sometimes the mountains
curtain the call, or a semi

bleating its long, low horn,
its lights scanning the corn.

But 50,000 watts fighting
Dolly Parton or a revival

travels. When it’s clear
you can hear the Dodgers

in Chicago and know a wave
arrayed in the distance

spun out its curve
to find you.
 
 
Reception

        for the 2008 NL Division Series

When my father called from the park I could
        barely hear, “Dempster’s losing it out there.”

I walked to my car on the street
        and pines cued up the signal.

The neighborhood cut a band
        in the Virginian sky, but static

clustered my sunroof, circled
        out from the wringing of my hands.

 

Already behind we couldn’t find a hit—
        winning 97 gone with a fiddling of the dial.

From the mound you shook off Soto’s sign,
        the announcer said, and instead

of finishing them, the walks fell
        like stars from your hand.
 
 
~  ~  ~

MarchettiSandra Marchetti is the author of Confluence, a debut full-length collection of poetry from Sundress Publications, and a co-author of Heart Radicals, a forthcoming chapbook of love poems. Eating Dog Press published an illustrated letterpress edition of her essays and poetry, A Detail in the Landscape, and her first volume, The Canopy, won Midwest Writing Center’s Mississippi Valley Chapbook Contest. Sandy’s work appears in The Hollins Critic, Sugar House Review, Subtropics, Ecotone, Green Mountains Review, Blackbird, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She teaches Interdisciplinary Studies at Aurora University, outside of her hometown of Chicago.