Roberto Clemente: Prince of the Island

For the last time, look, Roberto, on this island,

the lights of San Juan glowing in the dark

like candles in the houses of the poor,

who are casting their nets into the night

where dreams wriggle like fish.

Below you, the Atlantic looms like death.

The pilot, Jerry Hill, from Ypsilanti,

banks the DC7 to the right

for the flight to Nicaragua,

the fuselage of the charted plane overloaded

with supplies for the victims of the quake.

New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1972,

millions of miles behind you,

a thousand flights between the ballparks

in the States, three thousand hits

rattling the opposition, ricocheting off

scoreboards all over the National League—

see the engine burst in flame—

Ave Maria, my time has come!

Tell us, Roberto, that death is not

so terrible after all, that the ocean

in which you float, the salt in your wounds,

is no worse than a ninety-eight-mile

Steve Carleton fastball in the ribs

or crashing into the ivy-covered

red-brick wall at Forbes Field.

Tell us, Roberto, because we need to know

what death is and what it is not.

We look for meaning in your sudden

departure from the race.

In spite of the slurs and taunts,

many nameless acts of kindness.

The poor mourn you like a saint,

two continents pay their respects.

Everyone knows your name.

Behind the bravura at the plate,

putting the Yankee pitchers in their place—

showing the Norteamericanos

how their game is played—

We wait for some word from you,

a gesture from the sea perhaps,

but each day, as life does death,

one ocean meets another with indifference.

Though we resolve to live meaningfully,

the great questions go unanswered.

This much we understand, however—

it’s Clemente, not Casey at the bat,

It’s Roberto, Prince of the Island,

returning from that last flight to Managua,

rounding third, heading home,

surviving in the laughter of the poor.

                          Robert Forrey, 1973

My Two Alberts

The Alberts—not  Schweitzer or Einstein

But my two Alberts—lived up to the names

Of their illustrious namesakes just fine.

Not participating in American games— 

All of which involved solitary balls—

They preferred instead to play hide-and-seek

With truth—children ignoring their mothers’ calls,

Waiting for the mystery of night to speak. 

Into the heart of darkness they schlepped,

Time’s troubadours who had lost their way—

Time’s insomniacs, they only slept—

And that figuratively—during the day. 

But before retiring, they saw the light:

Relatively, night was day, day was night.

                                  Robert Forrey, 2012

Einstein: General Theory of Tic Tac Toe

Einstein pondering the problem

His personal life was in shambles.

His marriage was a mess.

“My mind, instead of racing, rambles,”

He wrote his Yiddish mistress.

He was hitting the laughing gas hard.

He wasn’t sleeping much either.

Inhaling N₂O  by  the yard

Was his idea of a breather.

He was being such a dumb cluck.

He was being such a schmo.

His mistress told him, “Such a schmuck!

Tic Tac Toe? What’s to know?”

Standing at the blackboard, he pondered

The covariant X’s and O’s.

When his mind wandered, he wondered

What, if anything, a schmuck knows.

But stubbornness was his dominant trait—

His sense of destiny his  mission.

He was willing to stand and wait,

To be faithful to his vision.

“Eureka!” he exclaimed one night.

It was better  than sex.

When he finally saw  the light,

It was N₂O =X+X+X.

                        Robert Forrey, 2010

Falling Asleep Over Isaacson's Einstein

“Oh, my! That Johnnie boy!

So crazy with desire.

While thinking of his Dollie

His pillow catches fire.”

(Verse the young Einstein wrote to his first wife,

Mileva, whom he, in time, was callously unfaithful to.)

In dreams begin not responsibility,

as Delmore Schwartz said, but roundness,

which, like gravity, was once

as hard to understand as relativity.

The wife, who watched her patent clerk sail

to the west, awoke to discover,

when he returned from the east,

the round earth flat, their home a jail:

sunlight squared is a whoreson,

equal to all the infidelity in the world.

The calculating clerk looked at figures,

understood curves and clocks are one,

understood, as scurvy is cured by lime,

the bias of space, the whirligig of time.

                            Robert Forrey, 2009