POETRY  
     

So vivid green, the field below,  -  -  -  
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3 Poems:  
Sunday at the Park, 
Lost Lakes, and 
Never Say Die
by  Dan Liberthson

Sunday at the Park  *

(To Stephen Sondheim)

​So vivid green, the field below, insistent
in the roaring sun: melding all our visions,
the big game takes our separate games
this liquid afternoon and fuses them in one.
 
Pointillist scene, the park condenses
from a swarm of discrete dots, static, yet
blending into a map of incipient motion,
as we disparate fans close to make a crowd.
 
Here’s the wind-up, the pitch is on the way:          
each attention fastens on the white spot of ball.
Not one of us knows what will happen next,
how the dots will rearrange, the possibilities
 
limitless even within the game: strike three,
a pop-up, wild pitch, homerun, sacrifice of any
species, batter struck or pitcher battered--
and what about outside the game? One time
 
an earthquake came and made it all moot.
Some insist it’s tedious, waiting for the pitch
time and time again, but these folks
miss the thrill each waiting moment
 
of their waiting lives contains: a fruit,
flavor forgotten but familiar, hung
once on time’s tree—moment ripe for peeling,
glistening sections spread and savored,
 
tastes possible and actual sucked free.
Now another—can you reach it?--
on a higher, newer branch, slick with dew
condensed from your lifetime’s passage.
 
The batter readies, crowd sound gathers in:
light rays through a lens project a world
printed on film and brought to life again,
but the reel is stuck, the pitch is still to come.
 
Impossible to believe that if we close our eyes
this technicolor mirage will remain, not the crackling
blank of film burned through, image flown in smoke.
Yet we all have faith the scene will start anew
 
the moment our collective wink’s complete--
and this the miracle: eyes open again, everything
returns full strength; the film runs on, the batter
swings, gravity once more holds up and down.
 
It’s like the birthday party when you were five:
close your eyes, guess the present,
but the gift is hidden, so far the lovely wrap is all.
The magician waves, and out pops the white rabbit.
 
Players and spectators all, eyes on the ball,
none knows what each pitch will bring:
such pleasure, such dread, anticipating!
Every moment of every day, the pitch is on the way.

*  Author's Note:  “Sunday at the Park”
was published in The Pitch is on the Way:
​Poems about Baseball and Life (2008) by Dan Liberthson.

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Lost Lakes  #

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Formed in a land of small lakes,
fed by their vegetable essence,
I dreamed their closed, soupy smell,
fell into and swam in them,
twice nearly drowned in them,
saw a body drowned in one.
 
I grew to feel each person was a lake,
rising from hidden sources,
fed by streams from underwater nodes.
Each lake carried in solution all
memory and experience, which concentrated
and then precipitated out to be recognized.
 
In each mind, fish thoughts swam,
waves rippled, washed, and flowed,
currents followed one vein, then another.
The dead drifted down sheltered and embraced,
remembered and held kindly as they liquefied--
food and fuel for the still living lake.
 
The surface, like the skin of a bald head,
felt wind’s touch, plock of water drops,
hiss of slow geometric snow dissolving.
Waterspiders gliding in calm shallows
sensed the knockknockknock of wind-driven
waves sounding against boats and docks.
 
Above and upon and beneath passed,
over and over again, moon, sun, cloud--
solid or reflected images, light and dark,
all traversing a world various and changing.
But the deep was worm quiet: calm soft mud
cradled whatever drifted down—everything.
 
2
 
The Pacific I’ve come to live by
is another matter: uncontained,
ruthlessly horizontal, attacking the senses.
The eyes mount in their sockets,
trying to see far enough to grasp that immensity
but it's no use. Dwarfed, not comforted,
 
I feel my skull’s mild liquids yanked from its earholes
by a feral wind, from clinched nostrils by fierce salt air,
reft as from a blown egg.
Beside this merciless girth and endless depth
I sense lives and deaths lost, unreachable.
Gone the snug lakes of the youth, left behind.
 
Am I unkind to this unpacific ocean?
Do I neglect praise for dolphins, whales
and wondrous other creatures of its deep?
For the slashing colors of the setting sun?
I stand at the Western edge—ocean before me,
lakes far behind—and wait for the dark to come.

#  Author's Note:  “Lost Lakes” was published in
Morning and Begin Again, (Fennel Press, 2012),
by Dan Liberthson.

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​Never Say Die *

Raccoons scream in the backyard,
fighting, mating, whatever their business
and our dog whines groans claws
at the door, fierce to wipe anything
 
not-dog from the gaping planet.
I remember when I was young
someone opened the door and boys
went with blood high shooting through
 
green vistas at the screaming enemy
caught in his own throes and not--
at first shock—shooting back.
Later, the flood tide of steel shat-
 
tered the air with screams of a new
meaning, and some came limping
home, pain bitten into their faces,
astonished that so small a people, so
 
small a place could ravage them through.
Some nights ago our dog caught
the raccoons, outweighed each three
to one but limped home torn bloody
 
about the ears eyes muzzle
with no evidence in the gray
morning light that any raccoon
was damaged or even fazed.
 
Nearly healed now he’s ready
to go again, his young crazy
male heart hormonally mad
to defend to kill to be maimed
 
for his pack his tribe his kin,
for what if he could speak
he'd call his country.
He doesn’t know he’ll never learn
 
those raccoons are welcome
to the damned backyard all night
so long as he comes home alive
and sound as so many never did.
 
When I pull him from the door he
whimpers wild with pain of staying:
let me go die for you, let me go.
In the cozy light of our kitchen
 
suddenly between two breaths
I feel the world tilt
and my heart freezes over
white with fear for the future.

*  Author's Note:  “Never Say Die” was published in
Animal Songs (2010) by Dan Liberthson.

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​​Born in Rochester, NY, Dan Liberthson attended Northwestern University and SUNY at Buffalo (PhD, English), has retired from a career as a medical writer, and lives in San Francisco and Cottage Grove, OR. He has published five books of poetry and individual poems in many journals, including The Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, South Coast Poetry Journal, Elysian Fields Quarterly, and Chaminade Literary Review. Dan has also written The Bluejay Contrivance, a spy novel, and The Golden Spider, a young-adult fantasy novel. Currently Secretary of the Oregon Poetry Association, Dan took second place in the William Stafford Memorial Award Poetry Contest (2020) and in the Maine Poets Society Contest (2022).  

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