This is the Way the Season Ends

While many of you were bird-doggin' chicks and bangin' beaver, or bearing witness to the bar mitzvah of your boy, or beatin' out that rhythm on a bongo, the real boys of the base-paths were blastin' balls out of the Bradds and bearing witness to the end of another bucolic season.    In honor of the end of the season I've composed a little ditty (with apologies to T.S.E. and everyone else): 

THE WIFFLE MEN

Mistuh Kurt - he dead.

I.

We are the wiffle men
We are the summer men
Leaning together
Caps filled not with hair, but with flesh
Our lyric voices, now dry,
When we speak together,
Are weak and lifeless
As wind across dry asphalt
Or squirrels feet over basalt
In our dry cellar

Pitch without form, bat without colour,
Arthritc force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to the season's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
listless players, but only
As the wiffle men
The summer men.


II

Stats I dare not meet in dreams
In the season's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the stats are
Sunlight on a cracked field
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading bloop single.

Let me be no nearer
In the season's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Capri pants, soiled sweatshirts
On a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --


III.

The rest of the players are not here
There are no players here
In this valley of dying days
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost season

On this last day
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this field of the tumid school


IV

Here we go round the chalk lines
The Chalk lines, the chalk lines
Here we go round the chalk lines
At nine o'clock in the morning


V

Between the lawn chair
And the batter's box
Between the pitch
And the swing
Falls the Shadow

For this is the end of the season

This is the way the season ends
This is the way the season ends
This is the way the season ends
Not with a whimper, but with twenty-three runs from the artist