On this ultimate spitball
steeped for who knows how many unseasonable seasons
under a parkside bush,
two tiny snails are tracing
fingerings: fast ball, slider, split finger, curve,
a patient rehearsal
over horsehide so putrefied
the regulation pressure-wound muscular core beneath
is dissolving like newsprint.
This is something you want
to drop, not throw: the old flirtation with gravity
has gone sour, there’s too much
dirt and scuff and sweat and smell,
the delicate infinite swell of the hand-stitched seams
protrudes from its flayed skin
like a skeleton, a bone of hope.
This thing is meant for the heavy hands of the dead.
So I tuck it back in the dark
as the snails polish their trail,
a couple of umpires searching for whatever it was
that made this ball jump once.
Michael McFee was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and grew up in the small community of Arden in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He has been poet-in-residence at Cornell and Lawrence Universities, and is now a Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor of English at his alma mater, UNC-Chapel Hill, where he teaches poetry writing and contemporary North Carolina literature. He is the author of six collections of poetry–including Earthly and Colander, both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and Sad Girl Sitting on a Running Board and Vanishing Acts, both published by Gnomon Press–and the editor of two anthologies published by the University of North Carolina Press: This Is Where We Live: Short Stories by 25 Contemporary North Carolina Writers and The Language They Speak Is Things to Eat: Poems by 15 Contemporary North Carolina Poets. His seventh collection, Shinemaster, whose title poem appeared in VQR, will be published by Carnegie Mellon in late 2005.