[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Then I have another softball poem,
this will be in the new book, which will be out in April.
This is a Villanelle.
The next year I start going to the games again,
this time the teams were different
and the grad students Barry and Hank Campbell,
who had been on the team had left town.
And one of the girls on one of the girls teams in town
was in social work of some kind and she
brought some of her charges to the games, to watch the game
and these were people who were handicapped in some way.
There were about 15 of them and I guess, some of them
were suffering from neurological problems,
and perhaps some of them may have been retarded,
I don't know.
But she was in charge of these people
and they sat watching the game and of course, I
watched the game, but I watched them too
and then I got to thinking how the way our minds work,
sometimes we turn ourselves into handicapped people.
And so I was thinking about them, and myself, and life
in general, the things you ought to be thinking
about when you write a poem.
So this is a Villanelle and it's called the Freaks at Spurgin
Road Field.
The dim boy claps, because the others clap
The polite word handicapped his muttered in the stands
Isn't it wrong the way the mind moves back?
One whole day I set contrite, dirt, LA Union Station 46
sweating through last night
The dim boy claps, because the others clap
Score 5 to 3 picture fading badly in the heat
Isn't it wrong to be or not be spastic?
Isn't it wrong the way the mind moves back?
I'm laughing at a neighbor girl beaten
to scream by a savage father and I'm ashamed to look
The dim boy claps, because the others clap
The score is always close, the rally always short
I've left more wreckage than a quake
Isn't it wrong the way the mine moves back?
The afflicted never cheer in unison
Isn't it wrong the way the mind moves
back to stammering pastures where
the picnic should have worked?
The dim boy claps, because the others clap.