My voice there echoes with less resonance
than a single rosary said in Notre Dame

As far as cathedrals remain, in my memory
no more than a blurry collection of flying buttresses:
Traffic snarled over the East River,
The stale stench of boiled hot dogs

What Ruth’s great house is to me
is little more than a sound (a soaring anticipation
thick in the July air; the crescendo of release,
of communal celebration) and a metaphor
(the crowd, countless thousands curved outward
away from home towards the poles,
half rising, a wave beginning to crest
on a bar of sand before curling upright
in a crashing tide of exaltation)

Start spreading the news…
I’m leaving today…

I take my measure of the place
in the same manner as it is disassembled:
piece by piece, eventually lost to the world
amidst other houses torn down,
amidst other momentary remembrances

Definitive memories cannot do justice
to a game shaped by the fractious pasts of so many