Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by a living poet.

And I think the only other living poet that I've read from on this show is Wendell Berry.

But right now, the baseball playoffs are in full throw. They are in the midst of

their hard-rendering, dramatic, tense, one batter at a time, everybody hanging on each pitch.

The player is clearly tense. There's no clock, so in some ways the game just feels to drag on

and drag on.

Of course, this is on my mind because my team, the Milwaukee Brewers, is one of his rare instances in my life of being in the playoffs.

So I've been paying pretty close attention to it.

But it got me thinking about this poem for today.

It's actually just called baseball.

It's by Gail Mazur, who is a poet from

Massachusetts, an award-winning poet, where she's been writing poetry since the 60s. Some of her

collections are Nightfire, The Pose of Happiness, They Can't Take That Away from Me, which was

finalist for the National Book Award, and a couple of other collections as well. Pretty widely

anthologized poet. She's received several push-court prize anthologies and been in the Best

American Poetry series and so forth. Today's poem, like I said, is called baseball.

The game of baseball is not a metaphor, and I know it's not really life. The chalky green diamond,

the lovely dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes multiplying around the cities are only neat

playing fields. Their structure is not the frame of history carved out of forest. That is not what I see

on my ascent. And down in the stadium,

...