Love Letter Postmarked Michigan and Trumball

It’s time. Pitchers and catchers have reported to Lakeland. I saw five birds on my run yesterday. The snow is melting. We’re (allegedly) going to have an early spring.

It’s a day after Valentine’s, and all I can think about is how much I love the Tigers.

LOVE LETTER POSTMARKED MICHIGAN AND TRUMBALL

It’s the legs I fall in love with,
the high knee socks and pants stopping
just at the crest of calf
small bay of knee.

They’re Brandon Inge’s legs
sublime and twitchy at third base

the shudder in Abuelito’s walk
the limp when he shuffled into the Loma
with a mistress at his hip

wondering how I’d have been so surprised
when the man I love with the knees
made of glass
betrayed me.

I must have fallen in love with
Abuelito first, then Lance Parrish,
and now these Tigers

the way every woman in my family
has learned to love any man

stumbling over the positives
(“we were in almost every game”)

waiting for next year
it could always be so much worse
as a friend says, “we could all have one leg.”

Oh, Abuelito, teaching me
to love the lost men before I knew
he was among them

to love them even more the further they went away
when one could only listen through the radio
in the driveway of the old house on Fairmont
Ernie Harwell forever notching the scores

his lovely wife Lulu eternally waiting at home
with dinner still warm

losses stepping upon losses

like the bricks of the new ballpark.

How I waited for them for years
and they couldn’t even
set the record
for most losses in one season

because that, in its own way, would be
a kind of win.

But it’s smaller—the man at the plate
when every out is a war
and every strike a reason to leave
and every pitch, my love, is a weak ankle
shattering.