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Coach
by Don Colburn
Winner of the 2009
Duckabush Prize for
Poetry
Final Judge, Judith
Kitchen
Three hundred-umpteen
wins, no two
the same. Squeakers,
laughers, classics,
dogs,
train wrecks, rain
checks, comebacks,
donnybrooks
and one epic walkoff you
watched alone
from the left field
bleachers, banished
for helping the umpire
do his job.
All that showing up to
play a game
without a clock, between
the lines
on
a given field, a given
afternoon.
A
million times you dug in
from the bench: The ball
is
thrown, swung at,
struck, chased after,
caught
and thrown and caught
and thrown again,
each pitch a chance, a
choice.
Years built you a wall
of stories,
box scores, game balls
autographed
by
kids now mortgaged deep
in middle age
who’d love to know
someone believes in them
the way you dared –
I
remember a sultry summer
evening
more than half our lives
ago,
the dusk busy with
crickets and fireflies.
We
traipsed back to our
bunks –
you, me, Bit and Lenny,
maybe Courto –
as
twilight caught on top
of the pole,
that absurd birdhouse,
green and white, its
blind eye
open, a hundred feet
away and thirty up.
Just past the infirmary,
someone dared you
and you reached down for
the right stone,
looked back – all clear
–
kicked your left leg up
and leaned
and hurled that stone
into the dying light.
We
didn’t move or breathe
until a knockabout shot
rattled the world
and a gust of purple
martins
flew up like blueblack
bits of night.
And the stone did not
come down.
for Bob
Colburn on his induction
into the Baseball
Coaches Hall of Fame
Judges comments:
"There's a crackling
life-affirming energy in
this poem as it plays
its own linguistic games
with some interesting
internal and slant
rhymes. What's
more--nothing is forced
as it almost
effortlessly earns its
magical last line."
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