Black Sox Scandal
Black Sox Scandal
Tom Grauman
Late October, sure as shootin’
there they are:
the rain pelted pigeons,
clothespinned to the power lines
like rows of black socks, hung out improbably to dry,
spiking a blank-stare sky
Plenty enough to outfit a 40 man roster,
and then some
Unsentenced, tarred and feathered,
the socks droop and seep,
suspended in soggy purgatory
Tattered kites twitch on bare limbs
No one even bothers to toss them cleats
Not that Shoeless Joe woulda worn ‘em
Joe’s mate, Happy Felsch, happy to filch,
washed-up some five years later with the Scobey Outlaws,
running down flies
Oscar Levant famously teased, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”
Integrity too brittle to suffer an insult.
Doves by another name
Tom Grauman is a retired social worker living in Nanaimo, British Columbia (Canada). He became a lifelong baseball fan during the1962 World Series while aboard a banana cargo ship from Valparaiso, Chile to New York City.
Jeff Brain is a San Francisco-based baseball artist and poet. He was a featured poet at the first two National Baseball Poetry Festivals, and now serves on the Poets Committee of the NBPF held each May in Worcester, MA.
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