Bruce Smith

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