The Husbands (2004)

Dawn Potter

Their work boots were filmed with grease,

and their faces were weary.

They never showed up till the fourth inning.

Knees spread, they let themselves rest

on chairs beside the gravel-pocked ball field;

and when the women hollered, “Good eye, honey!”

at a tearful, trembling batter,

the men smiled like gentle but distracted strangers.

In their houses, a drawer slammed,

a kettle boiled, a hound twitched on the mat.

Televisions gabbled,

and the husbands pined for a secret world.

One drove six hours in dense fog

to a motel in Mississauga

instead of sitting down to supper.

Another stayed up till dawn

picking out “Night of the Johnstown Flood”

on his mother-in-law’s old guitar.

They fumbled with their sadness,

but nothing changed.

Women still clustered along the ball field

sharing packs of licorice, cat-calling the ump,

cheering at bloop singles and horrible throws to first.

The women behaved as if they had front-row tickets

to something magnificent and vital,

but the husbands couldn’t see, couldn’t quite see.

They raised their eyes toward the blackening sky

where swallows wheeled among the mosquitoes.

A child hacked at a pitch,

and the men’s thoughts clung to emptiness.

No one cried, “Cross out this life

that batters you down, and down, and down!”

Like chairs left in the rain for twenty years,

they sat.

Then one day their knees snapped

and they toppled into the flood.

[from Chestnut Ridge, a verse history (in progress) of southwestern Pennsylvania]