Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

Umpire

D A B N E Y S T U A RT Umpire for my daughter He learns to imagine the vertical shaft of air hanging above home, to hear its inaudible hum when pitches he can’t see tick its corners. Under the lights, when the humidity is right, it becomes prismatic, shimmering with the curve’s kiss, the slider’s quick dive. Sometimes, after calling one perfect, pivoting, driving his right arm out and back in a groove smooth as a piston’s, he looks away over the green swath toward the lights, seeming to carry that brightness in his eyes. If he could hold it there all the time no one would argue with him, no distorted faces writhe Hydralike into his, no benches clear. Everyone would see 124 ❚ The 1980s how his vision was the strike zonebrilliant, impeccable, fair. And the earth is flat, and, next spring, bullfrogs in Bradenton will sprout wings. Still he lets his mind wander briefly inside that aura, touching the certain borders of his calling, his peaceful dream. Then he edges back out of it, watches the bright air disperse, the pitcher lean in again for his sign. Crouching, he rests his hand absently on the catcher’s ribs, feels the tender vibrations of the ball hitting the mitt, sensing the red seams’ rapt nestle into the leather. It is, after all, the dependable magic instant he keeps waiting on, between the ball’s untoward rest and his own voice breaking the silence, before he turns the invisible quick trace of the pitch into a statistic, building the box score, the record book, some other’s dream. The 1980s ❚ 125 ...