Baseball Poems 

Here are three “choice” short poems from Tim Peeler, from his book “Touching All the Bases.”   He has given us permission to reproduce them.

 

              Budweiser!

Budweiser! he calls
between innings, between pitches,
between breaths

          An Asterisk as Big as a Ball

the ball talked to
three hundred thirty feet of air,
rising into the teeth
of the bat's echo,
crashing into right field bleachers
like any other Yankee missile —
an exiled hero
circled the Ruthian diamond
to footnote glory —
just down the first base line
 the magic bat lay,
 like a gun that had killed
 its owner.

          whiskey moon

 frank says the full moon
 is for whiskey,
spits tobacco to punctuate
his short sentences,
hours sipping, replaying
his career in slow motion,
oiling the first baseman's mitt,
 then spreading it carefully
 to catch the milky light,
frank says it softens the leather,
I say it embalms the memory. 

These come from a  soft cover 128 pages
with index published by www.mcfarlandpub.com
( they take two weeks to send, but you are helping
  this company stay alive, or you can buy from
 Amazon, for the same price, but perhaps faster
delivery.  While they are all mostly baseball,
some are not.  He is a unique American poet.
He lives in Hickory, North Carolina.