Dream in Which I Love a Third Baseman, poem by Lisa Olstein

DREAM IN WHICH I LOVE A THIRD BASEMAN
by Lisa Olstein

At first he seemed a child,
dirt on his lip and the sun
lighting up his hair behind him.

All around us, the hesitation
of year-rounders who know
the warmer air will bring crowds.

No one goes to their therapist
to talk about how happy they are,
but soon I’d be back in the dugout

telling my batting coach how
the view outside my igloo seemed
to be changing, as if the night

sky were all the light there is.
Now, like two babies reaching
through the watery air to touch soft

fingers to soft forehead, like blind fish
sensing a familiar fluttering in the waves,
slowly, by instinct, we became aware.

Off-field, outside the park, beyond
the gates, something was burning.
The smell was everywhere.

Source: Radio Crackling Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Lisa Olstein received a BA from Barnard College and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her first book of poems, Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (2006), won the Copper Canyon Press Hayden Carruth Award. Olstein is also the author of the poetry collections Lost Alphabet (2009), named one of the nine best poetry books of the year by Library Journal, and Little Stranger (2013). Her poems have appeared in the Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, LIT, and other journals. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Centrum. She teaches in the New Writers Project at the University of Texas-Austin. (Source: poetryfoundation.org.)

PHOTO: Ron Santo, born in Seattle, Washington in 1940,  was a third baseman in Major League Baseball who played from 1960-1974, all but the last year with the Chicago Cubs. A nine-time National League (NL) All-Star, he batted .300 and hit 30 home runs four times each, and is the only third baseman in major league history to post eight consecutive seasons with 90 runs batted in (RBI) (1963–1970). He was the second player at his position to hit 300 career home runs, joining Eddie Mathews, and also ended his career ranking second to Mathews among third basemen in slugging average (.464) and third in runs batted in (1,331), total bases (3,779) and walks (1,108). He passed away in 2010. (Source: wikipedia.org.)