Boys of Summer

The radio rustles with their return every year and somehow
No other team will suffice and no other worldly honor will be lauded.

They play the games those large men, they fly into each other as if each had a purpose.

The puck will sing, the ball will be kicked, but still part of us waits for the boys.

It is perhaps the inner life of those players -- we watch them wait for the pitch and imagine
inside ourselves what they might be thinking. I have always watched them. Their inner life, like the inner life of a nun, has always spoken to me.

When you stand still and wonder. When you stand still at the barre and wait for instructions. When you stand still and wonder what life will give you at that particular moment.

The moment when a ball will be hurled at you at 90 mph and then you must decide what to do.

And you have no time.

And you have nothing to rely upon but your instincts and your experience.

Ballet dancers, baseball players and nuns, how could you know how much they have in common. And yet, they do.

This I know because I have been all of them, either in reality or in my mind.

I have been all of them.