A Poem about Baseballs

By Denis Johnson b. 1949 Denis Johnson

for years the scenes bustled

through him as he dreamed he was

alive. then he felt real, and slammed

awake in the wet sheets screaming

too fast, everything moves

too fast, and the edges of things

are gone. four blocks away

a baseball was a dot against

the sky, and he thought, my

glove is too big, i will

drop the ball and it will be

a home run. the snow falls

too fast from the clouds,

and night is dropped and

snatched back like a huge

joke. is that the ball, or is

it just a bird, and the ball is

somewhere else, and i will

miss it? and the edges are gone, my

hands melt into the walls, my

hands do not end where the wall

begins. should i move

forward, or back, or will the ball

come right to me? i know i will

miss, because i always miss when it

takes so long. the wall has no

surface, no edge, the wall

fades into the air and the air is

my hand, and i am the wall. my

arm is the syringe and thus i

become the nurse, i am you,

nurse. if he gets

around the bases before the

ball comes down, is it a home

run, even if i catch it? if we could

slow down, and stop, we

would be one fused mass careening

at too great a speed through

the emptiness. if i catch

the ball, our side will

be up, and i will have to bat,

and i might strike out.

Denis Johnson, “A Poem about Baseballs” from The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New. Copyright © 1995 by Denis Johnson. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (1995)

Biography

Denis Johnson was born in Munich, Germany where his father worked for the State Department. Johnson grew up in the Philippines, Japan, and Washington D.C. and earned an MFA from the University of Iowa. An award-winning novelist, short story writer, and playwright, Johnson published his first collection of poems, The Man Among the Seals (1969), at the age of twenty. Subsequent collections include Inner Weather (1976), The . . .

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