Fastball

I loved wrinkling time.
Father loved baseball.
He’d take me out back to play catch.

He always threw fastballs,
Faster, harder, face taut, eyes narrow,
As if to say, “You better catch these,

“But don’t get too cocky, Son.
I bring your mother to tears.
I knock your sister to the ground.”

I learned how to conceal
The pain of the stung palm,
The pride of the catch.

When he’d let me go,
I’d race back to books,
Beg God for a planet, a tesseract.