The greatest of hitters, legend has it,
have learned the trick of the slow eye:
a magic that contrives to see in slowed
emotion every turn and twist of hurled
white sphere that rotates its seams
in heightened view for those who've found the way
to note the ball's in-flight curve or swerve
or straight and narrowed path, heart to heart,
so that the bat can be administered
precisely dead-on through the line of fire,
for the sake of the sweetest intersection
that sends the pill back the other way,
remaking its career, and the pitcher's, too.
It's as if history were rewriting itself
on the way to the plate; as if the ball,
destined for a soft home, a shelter,
a tender pocket of comfort and desire,
were snatched of a sudden by death's
harvesting swing, which must be seen though,
in this case at least, as just another life,
arising in what some eyes have come to know.
