 This is called Good Spirits. Another cool evening on the bleachers. This is when my boyfriend, Tom's recreational softball team is going to play. He is a childcare worker for children's shelter care, and I am a librarian. In the dusk under the lights of the field, the silhouette of the city before us, it would be almost romantic if we weren't shivering with cold. I'm sitting in a too thin yellow sweatshirt. The children of children's shelter care loped towards us. Two of them have sweatshirts, two with the hoods pulled up over their ears and heads. One of them is in red, and the other in blue. Two dots of color and four other kids move down the playing field and bounce onto the bleachers. Who's winning, says one. He sits next to me and leans into my lap. We're not winning. We are losing now, and very badly, 16 to 4. The pals slipping and sliding. The children are here to see the final game in the Division D championships of recreational slow pitch softball. The Department of Social Services is dominating the children's shelter care. We are, we are, shouts Sandy, one of the counselors. The kids cheer the blatant lie. In the stands, they climb over one another. The childcare counselors, people who have come to support the other team. Raz, the head counselor at the children's group home, is up next at bat. Let him know, shouts Sandy, at a level two or three times the volume I am used to. Raz was a professional football player, but as a softball player, he is out of his element. His body is partially solid, but there's also a new factor reflecting after hours lounge time. The kids, though, are excited. They jump up and down. They run in between the stands and shout, let him know, roars Sandy, his lungs expanding. We really haven't looked good in this game. We started out with three runs, and the DSS moved in, making run after run, home runs and triples, balls dropping out of our fingers. Our legs flailing about us if we were novice ice skaters. What's the score, asked Lamont? 16 to four, it's Sandy. I scrutinize his face to see if he's ready to under cover this deception. Eagerly, Lamont asked again, and who's winning? Us, Sandy, in tones, us 16 to four. Every kid in CSSC's program has now arrived. There are 40 of them total. Raz thought that they'd like to see CSC in this, the championship game of Division D. Raz sheepishly smiles at us. The kids have arrived in small groups. Now they are a huge crowd. I hope that we will forticiously get another 16 runs. I know that things like that happen. I look at these abandoned, abused children who live in group homes. It is hard to imagine anyone hurting them. I have been looking at Lamont and Darnell. Now I hastily turn to see the last swoop of the ball pitched to Raz. He swings broadly. Strike one. They're cheating, shouts one of our kids. The kids are now politely sitting in the stands. It is quiet. Sandy, six feet four in lean, snakes through a bench, through a cluster of children. He had the basketball rebounding record for his high school in Pennsylvania. A triple, make it a triple. A triple, all the kids cheer. A triple, Sandy has revived the previous frenzy. The ball is released again. Raz swings down to hit a ball that would have been a ball one. But this pitch is actually hit. It is a grounder towards third. Beat it out, beat it out. Tom aggressively shouts. Tom is transformed in the lights of the field from kindly Tom into the semi-belligerent team manager. He paces, waving his arms, vaguely resembling Smokey the Bear. Raz runs towards first base. He arrives a second before the ball. The children from CSC are all standing and clapping. It has now become seriously cold. The wind flies icily over the field. Bill is up at bat and gets two strikes. Raz waves happily from first. All about me, Andrea and the other counselors are gathering up the kids to go because it is getting too cold. The kids have been promised softball and pizza. They dash off the stands without noticing that Bill has struck out. Raz is still on first base, waving goodbye and maintaining the illusion of victory at the CSC group, grows smaller and fades beyond the lights. Pizza, pizza, shans the group of six, two in sweatshirts that arrived together. Pizza, pizza, two more outs and the game is over. It ends early. Another team is scheduled and they are impatiently waiting for us to leave. The score is so lopsided that the game ends and ending early by the slaughter rule and we are hastened off the field. Tom gathers up the bats and gloves. The usual place, he says. The team and its friends meet at our sponsoring bar. It is decorated with hoods of the 1950s cars. R&B is playing on the jukebox. What was the score, asks Ellen behind the bar. 16 to four, says Sandy. Who won? We did, Sandy's imagination brings us a tray of desperados, what a team gets when they win. I have only been told of these nefarious drinks for winners. I sip one. It tastes, resembles turpentine. The team arrives little by little. The bar fills with revelers in a drunken haze. Defeat an imaginary concept. We rejoice our inglorious disaster. And this is a poem by Indigo Hodgkis, who some of you might know. And I'm working on a book of her poetry right now that should be coming out soon and this is included in it. And I didn't realize that she had a poem about baseball. She also has one about the basketball players in Golden Gate Park. This is called Sunday at the Park. So visit green, the field below, insistent in this roaring sun, melding all our visions. The big game takes our separate games. This liquid afternoon infuses them in one. A pointless facade, the scene condenses a swarm of discrete dots, static yet combining to yield a single impression, incipient motion as we spare it 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, a wild pitch, home run, sacrifice of any species, batter struck or batter 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, waiting time and time again, but these folks must miss the thrill, each waiting moment of their waiting lives contains. It is a fruit of unknown flavor, even though familiar hung once on time's tree, a ripe moment to be peeled, a glistening section spread and savored, taste actual and possible, sucked free. Now another, can you reach it on a higher newer branch, slick would do, condense from your lifetimes passage, the battered reddies, crowd sound gathers in, light rays through a lens project a world, printed on film and brought to life again, but the reel is struck, 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 up in smoke, yet we all have faith, the scene will start anew. The moment our collective's winks complete and this the miracle, eyes open again, everything returns full strength, the film runs on, the batter swings, gravity once more holds up or down. It's like the birthday party when you were five, close your eyes, guess the present, but inside there is no gift, the lovely rap is all, the magician waves out pops the white rabbit, then disappears, players and spectators all, our eyes are on the ball, we don't know what each pitch will bring, such pleasure, such terror, anticipating, each moment of the day, the pitch is on the way. And I have one last poem, shorter poem, is called Visiting Kansas City, Missouri. The little diner, barbecue and benches, noon sun, gazing over a bridge, running backwards to find a river, sunken steamboat, an ambiguous slave or free state, union or confederacy, nearby Ferguson, black lives matter. Saturday night in front of the Blue Note Jazz Club, couples of all kinds stroll on the sidewalk, chatting with strangers, mansions near the Asian Art Museum, taxi drivers who ask for directions by a hotel, mattresses carried away on the top of taxis by taxi drivers. A stocky young white boy happily jogs around the bases of the Negro League's baseball museum's diamond, past statues of Josh Gibson and Satchel Page. We all seem to get along, but people keep asking us why we're here.