Saving Face

After I park, after I step out and close
my door behind me, I make certain not
to look back where my father, past eighty,
pushes off with his arms, gritting his teeth
through bone-on-bone contact in his knees.

For years, each day has welcomed him
by repeating its orders to limp and wheeze.
Dutiful, I have learned to walk slowly
and slightly ahead, an arrangement
that seeks to blind and deafen me.

Nearly overhead, trucks groan through
the upward curve to the express lanes
to Pittsburgh. The field he wants me to see
has lost thirty yards to a knot of overpass,
one end zone forested by stanchions.

Now, the century fresh, my father says
semi-pro meant being paid, game by game,
according to gate receipts, that he knew,
as they huddled, whether he was earning
as much as his baker’s-assistant wage.

All of us, he says, would have played
for nothing, dishing it out and taking it
on a surface baked so hard that grass
was a memory. So unforgiving, he says.
It taught you what a ballgame could be.

The beer garden we passed, he says,
that’s where my coach, Fats Skertich,
was shot and killed after an insult over
a baseball bet unpaid. The welsher that
Fats slapped left and returned with a gun.

My father has me lay hands upon the earth
between the ghosts of sidelines, test
the resilience of the soil with my shoes.
That fellow, he says, had time to think,
and still he shot, then lapses into silence

that lasts the field’s width as if we need
to reach the opponent’s sideline before
he adds, “Some, you should know, took
the shooter’s side. Then the war began,
swallowed most of us, and ended it.”

*

Gary Fincke’s latest collection is The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems 1980-2025
(Press 53, 2025). His most recent collection of new poems is For Now, We Have Been
Spared (Slant Books, 2025).