The Shortstop

Pick up the ball and hold it
while you analyze the vectors
of the heart. To describe
for one last time this town
knowing where every street goes
and who lives there. And why.
Where does the money come from?
The old house on the corner
has been painted brown.
Your dog never came home.
To analyze the spaces
inside a broken house. To touch
her again where she's truest,
most impossible to describe.
To find all the mythologies
her name opens up, to enter
that museum or laboratory
or bedroom or terrible porch
on a summer sunset there is
no one at all in the street.
Then throw the batter out.

--Robert Kelly, from this