Pinsky, "The City"

I live in the little village of the present

But lately I forget my neighbors’ names.

More and more I spend my days in the City:

The great metropolis where I can hope

To glimpse great spirits as they cross the street

Souls durable as the cockroach and the lungfish.

When I was young, I lived in a different village.

We had parades: the circus, the nearby fort.

And Rabbi Gewirtz invented a game called “Baseball.”

To reach first base you had to chant two lines

Of Hebrew verse correctly. Mistakes were outs.

One strike for every stammer or hesitation.

We boys were thankful for the Rabbi’s grace,

His balancing the immensity of words

Written in letters of flame by God himself

With our mere baseball, the little things we knew…

Or do I remember wrong, did we boys think

(There were no girls) that baseball was the City

And that the language we were learning by rote—

A little attention to meaning, now and then—

Was small and local. The Major Leagues, the City.

One of the boys was killed a few years later,

Wearing a uniform, thousands of miles away.

He was a stupid boy: when I was captain,

If somehow he managed to read his way to first,

I never let him attempt the next two lines

To stretch it for a double. So long ago.

Sometimes I think I’ve never seen the City.

That where I’ve been is just a shabby district

Where I persuade myself I’m at the center.

Or: atrocities, beheadings, mass executions,

Troops ordered to rape and humiliate—the news,

The Psalms, the epics—what if that’s the City?

Gewirtz, he told us, means a dealer in spices.

Anise and marjoram used for embalming corpses,

For preserving or enhancing food and drink:

The stuff of civilization, like games and verses.

The other night, I dreamed about that boy,

The foolish one who died in the course of war:

He pulled his chair up so he faced the wall.

I wanted him to read from the prayer-book.

He didn’t answer—he wouldn’t play the game.

Robert Pinsky