The Game In Autumn
by Joan Payne Kincaid
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When the world caves in they still play baseball
in your room rooting for the scruffy ones like
motorcycle gangs that make the burger-joint on the
hill-top a place no one wants;
this one with red beard and long hair: this pitcher
with look of tango master in his eye of fallen women
falling through past tense; little underrated legs
make it home; players slow down in re-plays paralyzed
as frozen crickets; he grounds out at 7th inning stretch
like some drunk controlled by another drink to write
or paint tired raving females without enough hormones
to climb--the endless cyclic-betrayal-
porn derivative confessional boredoms.
Sparrows play hide and seek at porch column
oblivious to the creeping stalker; it is not play that
moves your legs to painful studio.
The trees are flesh shades...ocher, blushers;
time to funnel breasts in soft pink collisions
of power struggles; forget the painting's broken glass
reflecting someone's rage in bed is some safe port
down stairs to dirt and clutter not quite fathomable
one way-trips; zapped poems called "typing" hide in magazines
that love them.
The light fades without benefit of re-play torn in harvesting
preserving birthing death double helix fall options,
not love affairs of remembered painted people
in head heart and possible soul. What is all
but archetype touch breath taste sight; perpetual change
with nights of feeling imperial as a colonizing president
or worn- out as wolves. It's time to be under falling leaves;
the light turns suddenly in autumn...a fast-ball low and away.
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