WILLIE MAYS LIVES AT ADJACENT MOMENTS IN TIME
Because he would be seen
Because he would be seen, ecstatically
Because he would be seized –
some god fine-tuned the tendons,
some demon wired the eyes
Because he can be read
Because he can be read as the psychic history of Alabama
Because mother hunger and quick-twitch kin
Because whiteness
Because to see him I take the subway to Shibe Park,
dark gusts of heat and light, a woman
holds a jar of pigs’ feet, a man in sharkskin.
By means of him, through and because
of him, I will imagine
I feel a little spirit trouble
Because Juneteenth and jubilee
Because the blast furnaces of Bessemer and a ruddy gold glow
Because a trance, a conjuration, a hoodoo
Because he would be born on black and white tv
Because he can be seen hitting a pink Spaldeen
with a broomstick in the streets of Harlem
Because of bus boycotts and Brown v
Because of double consciousness,
DuBois and Durocher
Because two entangled particles with opposite spin
Because he would be seen and not seen through,
otherwise, the ball drops into the abyss
Because he was ten in 1941
Because looking changes him: when seen
he’s a current of electrons, unseen he’s alive
in 1955, beyond and within
Because he was born south of Birmingham,
goddamn
Because in 1951 he was in shallow center
“He can’t play …the guy has two left hands,”
they said of Thelonius Monk, 1951
Monk in Harlem, Baldwin on the Left Bank,
Bird at Birdland
Because he writes his uncreated conscience in the dirt
Because he put the actual in italics
Always because of Alabama
Because cow field and pasture of agrarian America
Because whiteness is a map of obsession
Because Bull Connor and Jim Crow
In play man frees himself from sacred time,
Agamben says, and “forgets” it in human time
Because standing in his own shadow in the Polo Grounds
geological time spans between ball one and ball two
Because he could play the changes
I could play the thing I was hearing, Bird said
Because of Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell
Because he worked the three-two count
three parts nerve and two parts hambone
Ritual ties and structures the calendar, Agamben again,
play on the other hand, though we do not yet know
how and why, changes and destroys it
Because of infinite innings
Because I never saw a fucking ball leave a fucking park
so fucking fast in my fucking life – Leo “The Lip” Durocher
Because the body in excess of itself
Because of time’s asymmetry, he’s lost, he’s ongoing
Because the eye can’t actually see
the ball make contact with the bat,
it’s all contingency
Because everything curves
Because winter
Because winter with Clemente in the outfield in Puerto Rico
Because a man spins a tiny whiteness – an aspirin, a flame –
a man spits, squats. Another murders the air
with a bat, and Mays appears in states between
Because a formal solution to an emotional problem
Geological time spans between strike one and strike two
A blast, a sacrifice, a rotation of the sphere, a ripple through
