I want to reach into my own biography 
and shake loose the sun
until those faces, sipping light 

come back to me again–summer of childhood
glow carved into me by the broad shoulders
of tomboys, their fifth grade musculature

dragging whole notes from the surface 
of reflective gym floors and lilting this music
into the flinch of a net, the ball dropping to this

page in a blur of dribbles I spent transcribing
in my history of hugging sidelines and living
the loner to text, taking gym class as metaphor.

For every obvious ground ball I missed
was my shortstop, fielding the flight of pivot
and reflex and poetry on the ridge of making me 

human as she is, while defining the space 
I blunder through in her sharp angles breaching
beyond the girl I was and into the place I want

to meet her. But I can't. Three years later, she
starts over in a place without music and gives 
the boy in her to the boy. But I can't. Ten years

later, there are chapels full of wedding pews
and somewhere, I am still eleven, waiting out
the long afternoon on lonely benches, missing

fly balls in right field and waiting for her 
to come back. 

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