Today’s choice was tough, what with no important holidays any time soon from which to draw upon. OK, kidding. Actually, it was a bit tough because it seems that every poet who has ever put pen to paper has written a poem about his mother. Philip Larkin wrote a particularly honest poem about both his parents that starts out

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But somehow that didn’t seem quite appropriate for the sentiment most people would be looking for on Mother’s Day. So, instead, I’m relying on Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, who wrote a series of sonnets to his mother upon her death in the mid-80s. What makes these poems so remarkable is how they capture and celebrate the almost completely forgettable moments that pass between a mother and child a thousand times over the course of a lifetime.
From Clearances 3
(Listen)

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives–
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

From Clearances 5
(Listen)

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984

The cool that came off the sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

The trailer you’ve all been waiting for but didn’t even know it:

And damn proud of it! This last Friday night was the grand opening of the heavily hyped, highly criticized, mostly completed Regency Furniture Stadium, the new home for the equally new Southern Maryland Blue Crabs.

By all measures, the event was an overwhelming success. The stadium is very well designed, big enough that you can roam around freely, yet small enough to provide for an intimate baseball experience. And the team did its part by coming back from a 2-0 deficit with runs in the sixth, seventh, and eighth innings to win 3-2. In fact, back to back 8-7 victories on Saturday and Sunday helped complete the inaugural weekend sweep.

The Blue Crabs are an independent team, playing in the Atlantic League, meaning they have no affiliation with any of the Major League Baseball teams. While many would want you to believe that means the quality of play will be bad (a “glorified American Legion team” is how someone from another blog put it), the reality is starkly different. As Brooks Robinson, one of the owners, said in an interview prior to the first home game, “You’ll see Double-A pitching, and Triple-A hitting.” The game itself supported Robinson’s assessment.

So, why an independent team instead of an affiliated team? Two reasons, mostly: Each Major League team is alloted only so many minor league teams. And all the Major League teams are full up. If you want to bring an Orioles farm team to location B, you’re going to have to move it from location A, not just start up a new one. Also, the farm system has very clear geographic restrictions in order to protect each Major League team’s market. Even if, say, the Texas Rangers suddenly had the desire to move one of its farm teams to Southern Maryland, it wouldn’t be allowed because of the close proximity to the Bowie Baysox, an Orioles Double-A team. Independent teams can locate anywhere they want, irrespective of the geographic restrictions set by Major League Baseball.

Our Southern Maryland Blue Crabs came into the inaugural weekend off a six game road trip and sporting a 2-4 record. The three game sweep of the Lancaster (in your face Lancaster!) Barnstormers pushed the team above .500 for the first time since opening day. As the season unwinds, I will be posting regular game recaps and updates on the team’s progress. So check back regularly. And if you’ve got some time on your hands, come on down to Southern Maryland and catch some Crabs.

You decide.

Today would have been my 21st wedding anniversary.

Amor Vincit Omnia

Love is no more.
It died as the mind dies: the pure desire
Relinquishing the blissful form it wore,
The ample joy and clarity expire.

Regret is vain.
Then do not grieve for what you would efface,
The sudden failure of the past, the pain
Of its unwilling change, and the disgrace.

Leave innocence,
And modify your nature by the grief
Which poses to the will indifference
That no desire is permanent in sense.

Take leave of me.
What recompense, or pity, or deceit
Can cure, or what assumed serenity
Conceal the mortal loss which we repeat?

The mind will change, and change shall be relief.

–Edgar Bowers

On March 16 I brewed the St. Paul’s Porter kit from Northern Brewer. At the last minute I decided to tweak the recipe by adding a pound of pure clover honey. This addition bumped the original gravity to 1.058 without altering the flavor much, save perhaps for some subtle floral notes in the nose. What the honey did accomplish is bring the ABV up to just about 6%. The brew spent three weeks in the fermenter before being bottled. I popped the top on one about a week ago, mostly for scientific purposes. The beer was still pretty young, the flavors separated and competing against each other. There was a soda like fizz to the carbonation that I’ve experienced in most young beers. Overall, not terrible impressive, but still an adolescent.

Tonight I decided to knock back another one (or two). All I can say is, wow! what a difference a week can make! The roasted flavors have asserted themselves and the chocolate flavors most porters are known for has established a firm base against which the sweeter malt flavors play against. The carbonation isn’t where it could be just yet, but still results in a good inch or better of toffee colored head. Despite being at its bare minimum of maturation, this is still a beer I’d order again at a bar. I’m looking forward to what next week and the week after have in store for me.

Yesterday, our nation marked the fortieth anniversary of a terrible event, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. In the long history of abuses, that date looms largest for all the obvious reasons. But there are many other dates marked on the internal calendars of those who suffered through those tragic times–the murder of Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15 of the same year, and the brutal murder of a young man named Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. It is that last event that the poet Audre Lorde wrote so powerfully about in what is perhaps her best work, “Afterimages.” It is a fairly long poem, but one well worth the dozen or so reads it deserves. I am posting the third section here. Hopefully, it will compel some people to click on the link above and read the entire poem.

III

I inherited Jackson, Mississippi.
For my majority it gave me Emmett Till
his 15 years puffed out like bruises
on plump boy-cheeks
his only Mississippi summer
whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie
as a white girl passed him in the street
and he was baptized my son forever
in the midnight waters of the Pearl.

His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year
when I walked through a northern summer
my eyes averted
from each corner’s photographies
newspapers protest posters magazines
Police Story, Confidential, True
the avid insistence of detail
pretending insight or information
the length of gash across the dead boy’s loins
his grieving mother’s lamentation
the severed lips, how many burns
his gouged out eyes
sewed shut upon the screaming covers
louder than life
all over
the veiled warning, the secret relish
of a black child’s mutilated body
fingered by street-corner eyes
bruise upon livid bruise
and wherever I looked that summer
I learned to be at home with children’s blood
with savored violence
with pictures of black broken flesh
used, crumpled, and discarded
lying amid the sidewalk refuse
like a raped woman’s face.

A black boy from Chicago
whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi
testing what he’d been taught was a manly thing to do
his teachers
ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue
and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone
in the name of white womanhood
they took their aroused honor
back to Jackson
and celebrated in a whorehouse
the double ritual of white manhood
confirmed.

John Berryman killed himself by leaping from a bridge on January 7, 1972. In doing so, he followed in his father’s footsteps, a man who had shot himself to death when the poet was twelve years old. Berryman spent his entire life struggling with the image of his father’s death, exploring that and other deeply emotional themes through an alter ego named Henry, a character who populated Berryman’s “Dream Songs” poems. Despite his obsession, Berryman directly addressed his father’s suicide only once, in Dream Song #384. What resulted was perhaps one of the most powerful poems of the twentieth century.

Dream Song 384 

The marker slants, flowerless, day’s almost done,
I stand above my father’s grave with rage,
often, often before
I’ve made this awful pilgrimage to one
who cannot visit me, who tore his page
out: I come back for more,

I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave
who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn
O ho alas alas
When will indifference come, I moan & rave
I’d like to scrabble till I got right down
away down under the grass

and ax the casket open ha to see
just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard
we’ll tear apart
the mouldering grave clothes ha & then Henry
will heft the ax once more, his final card,
and fell it on the start.

When I was a kid, my class took a field trip to the McCormick Spice plant in the Inner Harbor of Baltimore. As we toured some laboratory area, the guide nonchalantly picked various nameless chemicals from among the racks and shelves of nameless chemicals and mixed them in a beaker he was carrying. All the while he spoke of R&D, how different products are created, etc., but never about what he was mixing in the beaker. When we got to the end of the laboratory tour, the guide poured his concoction into several dixie cups and handed them to us proclaiming, “Here, a vanilla milkshake!” And damned if it didn’t taste like a vanilla milkshake. Well, mostly.

I’d forgotten about that almost-tasting-like-a-vanilla-milkshake chemical mixture until I recently picked up a six pack of one of Anheuser-Busch’s forays into “craft brewing,” Winter’s Bourbon Cask Ale. I made this selection mostly by not reading the label closely enough. I was looking for something off the beaten path, and the description on the label (aged on bourbon barrel oak and vanilla beans) seemed to be exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. Had I read just a little further, the Anheuser-Busch name would have surely sent me off in another direction. But I didn’t and so I went home with a macrobrew wearing a microbrew disguise.

I discovered my mistake when I popped open and poured my first (and so far only) beer at home. Expecting something strong on the nose–bourbon or vanilla maybe?–I was surprised when I got almost nothing. Definitely no bourbon, and hints of vanilla only when I stuck my nose way down in the glass. There was something oddly reminiscent about that vanilla. There was also an odd “alcohol” smell to it. Bourbon has a smell. Scotch has a smell. Tequila has a smell. But so does nondescript, uncategorized alcohol, and that is what was coming through here. Very disappointing and a bit disconcerting (and two or three other dis- words I can’t think of right now)

So, after the disappointing nose I wasn’t expecting much flavor to come through on the palate either. Boy was I wrong. (Too bad this doesn’t turn into a great comeback story at this point, eh?) The vanilla flavor (wait, not flavor, but flavoring) was almost overwhelming. How could there be so little vanilla on the nose, but so much on the palate? Suddenly my memories of that little dixie cup came back to me. There was something artificial about this flavor. Maybe this beer really is aged on bourbon oak and vanilla beans, but I suspect the majority of the flavor is mixed up in a beaker in a lab and then added. Apparently, they haven’t figured out how to mix up a decent bourbon flavor in the lab yet, because there was none of that action going on at all. Making matters worse, peeking out from behind these overt flaws is the standard A-B macrobrew beer as the foundation for this effort.

As craft beers go, this is a Tinker Toy effort at creating a complex brew. I’ve still got five bottles of this left, so if you’re passing through town just stop in and I’ll send a couple home with you.

For the past ten years I’ve coached my son’s soccer team. I started when he was nine and the last season I coached was his U19 NCSL travel team. Then he graduated high school and went off to college. I got nostalgic, thinking of the fun I had with that first team when he was 9. So I told the league to give me a new U9 tean and I’d start over. Oh, I couldn’t wait to revisit those wonderful days of setting young soccer players off in the right direction, of shaping their skills and teaching them such important things as sportsmanship and fair play. Then the first practice happened.

Apparently, nothing puts a nice sheen on one’s memory like ten years of forgetfulness. Within five minutes of the first player arriving at the field the second player arrived and the inaugural wrestling matched ensued, followed by the inaugural rock throwing and the inaugural ball punted into a stranger’s car. The English language has also changed over the last decade. “Put the ball down” apparently now means “kick the ball at your nearest teammate’s head” and “line up here” means “everybody start pushing each other.” Players have also developed a new technique for memorizing instructions, which consists of repeating everything the coach says in a sarcastic voice while making funny faces and waving their arms around.

But all is not lost. Caleb is fast, even if he spends an awful lot of his time running directly at Giovanni and knocking him down. Kierce has volunteered to play goalkeeper, if for no other reason than because he thinks it will keep him from running laps. And when not picking fights with half the team, Xavier has got some decent moves, developed most likely from having to dodge the assaults of players with whom he has picked fights.

I’m not fully convinced that last time was as bad as this. I think the kids back then were a little more well behaved, that they listened to their coach just a little more. But just in case I’m wrong, and to prevent me from making the same mistake again ten years from now, I’m writing things down this time.