The Strike Zone vs. Democracy
The strike zone is better than democracy. Sure, the size depends on if the umpire hasn’t had supper and wants to call strikes to keep hitters swinging and end things. And its height depends on if the umpire has had a big meal and can’t crouch deeply enough to call the low strikes. Maybe a star pitcher nibbles near the corners and gets a few more calls, or a star batter backs up, convincing a blinking umpire the pitch was too far inside.
But the zone adapts to the size of every single hitter on both teams. Each umpire has their own interpretation of the box so all the players must learn that version so everyone treats it with newcomer’s eyes. A batter can swing at a strike or a ball. No law makes a pitcher throw only in the zone. There are countless ways for the ball to arrive there, fast or slow. What falls outside the zone is just as important as what fits in.
Sheet Music for the Left Ventricular False Tendon
As a soloist all our baby can do is wail in four different keys (food, diaper, sleepy, bored) and he can no more put one note after another than he can put his feet, but his mother and his nana play classical and jazz for him on long calming car rides while I hit him with rock, roll him with reggae and soothe him with soft female leads. So much of who we are is crammed into these staffs and bars, listening for the first notes from his so far treble clef palette.
But at the cardiac specialist’s, the doctor moves his transducer baton over our child’s chest in a tour of his heart with the throb and the thrum and the sigh of all the parts become one except for the left ventricular false tendon playing its occasional low note from a different page. “We don’t know why, but this often fades Like yours did after childhood,” he tells me. How rare this tune – a chord playing to no audience. And I just wanted to hear it alongside all the other false starts in case there is something we’ve been missing out on because there is no sheet music for this before all the genres arrive to vie for your sole attention and you become their finer tuned instrument.
Jocko Benoit is the author of three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Real Estate Deals of the Apocalypse. His poetry has appeared or will soon appear in New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, Rattle Poets Respond, Southern Poetry Review, Spillway and many other journals.