Light it up, light it up
Let’s catch a spark in the dark
Nothing to see but a ball
Glowing green, being tossed to and fro
Nothing to hear but the bugs
Beating out their bottomsong
And blissfully nothing to know, except—
This can’t last too long

You yell over the din
To tell me all about how
You’ve realigned things again
Baseball will be all over North America, you say
You looked up each metropolitan statistical area
In Canada and Mexico and the USA
And you did some weird math
To figure out where they’ll play
Mexico City’s got five teams
New York’s got a few
Some other town’s got a bunch
And Chicago still has two

“So you looked up the population on Wikipedia,” I press
“But what was the underlying source of your data?”
“What’s that?” you reply
“I couldn’t hear you over the cicadas”
And so we fall silent
Except for the pop of the ball in the glove
And it pops—boy, it pops
Ow—my hand
Eleven years old, but you throw like a man

For many long minutes we go
With nary a drop
“How many, you think?” I finally ask
“Oh, boy, I dunno—hundreds,” you say
As your throw slices the air
And you add with a laugh:
“I forgot you were even there”
You were in your imagination
And so was I
On a splendid summer night
Under a soft, black sky

— 30 —