Wall-wide murals at Mickey Mantle's,
a central perk hot spot fashionable
with super exact paintings
of Ebbets and Crosley Park
and Yankee Stadium situations
up the ying and yang
for me, the hour-late,
because nobody from Arizona
ever knows what time it is
But the baseball artiste had waited,
patient enough for me
to do a drop in from the desert,
for a burger and some chatter,
to bat with a baguette,
as the son of a South Texan
bewildered already by the bowels
of Penn Station, intimidated
as the wild wolf chased on the field
by sea gulls at Shea Stadium,
who had spent the previous day
walking across Manhattan
to his studio, wearing a ridiculous
reddish purple beret,
a spontaneous purchase
at a military supply store,
who reached the apartment
in the shadow of the Twin Towers,
eviscerated but enduring
the wide-eyed, world-weary
embrace of glass canyons,
the smell of sweet rolls
and garbage wafting in from rows
and rows of back alleys, taxis rolling
like bullets, wild-eyed preachers
mixed up by dirty magazines,
every language spoken at once
as public drinkers, private thinkers,
compassionate aliens in action
sold books on blankets
Only the pastoral lights could paint
a bolt-down for the bogey out there,
saving me from a big bad swing at my
home run hollow head