gerald says that senior slow pitch softball league play

commences tuesdays and thursdays at ten a.m./mostly

it’s retired detectives, welders, superintendents, telephone

men all come to the park to play slow pitch softball at

full speed/rules are: everyone bats every inning. gerald

keeps score/clyde is seventy-six, a warehouse man who

quit farming in the crisis and moved to the city/gerald

says the next batter up is eighty-two/he swings with one

hand an axe handle over the plate and chops line drives

that are tough to handle/gerald points to t.c., who has been

a star at shortstop since he was six/wearing his navy blue

and crimson tracksuit, he guns down three men in one long

inning/here everybody bats everytime and gerald says the

scoreboard attendant has to pay attention/he wants to know

what we are doing here during weekday work hours/he keeps

looking behind us, thinking there should be someone else

with us/for safety, there are two home plates to disrupt the

natural temptation to try and plow the catcher, one more

collision trying to get a run on the board/nobody’s wives or

kids have come out to watch/they have seen these men so often

before that i don’t think they would recognize these boys/we

stay until the late innings, when it gets hot and everything starts

to slow down, to give out/getting embarrassed, gerald shoos us

away, says you two ought to have some place better to be/he's

right that we should, but he's wrong that we do/out on the

field, close calls all defer to gerald, but he’s missed this one

bad/we were meant to find these fallen stars, so that one day

after many summers gone, still without a place to be and she

will say do you remember that scorekeeper?/gah, what was

his name?