Recite this before the Red Sox / Yankees game on Sunday night

I dreamed Ted Williams
leaning at night
against the Eiffel Tower, weeping.
 
He was in uniform
and his bat lay at his feet
--knotted and twiggy.
 
‘Randall Jarrell says you’re a poet!” I cried.
‘So do I!  I say you’re a poet!’
 
He picked up his bat with blown hands;
stood there astraddle as he would in the batter’s ox,
and laughed!  flinging his schoolboy wrath
 
toward some invisible pitcher’s mound
--waiting the pitch all the way from heaven.
 
It came; hundreds came! all afire!
He swung and swung and swung and connected not one
sinker curve hook or right-down-the-middle.
A hundred strikes!
The umpire dressed in strange attire
thundered his judgment:  YOU”RE OUT!
And the phantom crowd’s horrific boo
dispersed the gargoyles from Notre Dame.
 
And I screamed in my dream:
God! throw thy merciful pitch!
Herald the crack of bats!
Hooray the sharp liner to left!
Yea the double, the triple!
Hosanna the home run!

----Gregory Corso