Sweet Spot: Poems

Sweet Spot

6 SWEET SPOT My first real kiss: in Larry’s backseat, with Carla. She has just stepped off the plane, and bounding up leaps into my arms, wraps her legs around me, her breath logy with Larks and airplane food, and just as our lips touch I think of my first base hit six years earlier off Craig Lord, a left-hander for the Mice. I had just turned eleven, was youngest on the team, went three for three, had four RBI, and my first at bat came unraveling out of my Musial crouch and roped the first pitch into center. It sailed over second and bounced twice in the outfield grass, the only grass within miles. By Carla’s the river ran noncommittally through Collingswood and irrigated the grass and the long graded yard its waters groomed and greened. Would Carla have kissed me if she knew when I think of her now I don’t see her green shocking eyes or that dimple but the old galvanized cyclone fence beyond left field and across Nineteenth with the links reshaped by our climbing and sneaking into a PTC trolley barn? That when someone says Carla I no longer remember that kiss but the shock of a ball hitting a barrel? That I don’t remember the taste of her mouth or her lips but only my own? Dry-tongued, I ran crazy around the bases and rode standing into third, all the weight of life lifted for that moment like longing, or like remorse. ...