Simon Fleischer’s most recent poem to appear here was “Army Ants” (January 2017)

A Game of Catch
By Simon Fleischer

He always pitched underhand.
He leaned forward into the pitch,
shortening the distance between
where he stood and where I stood,
and the ball looped towards me,
its gentle mathematics asking me
to swing that bat as hard as I could.

I throw frisbees and toss footballs
in the park across the street
from the house in which we live.
My son—he could do this all day.
Run the buttonhook, one-handed,
over the shoulder this time, dad.
He’s always ready for a game.

The house by the lake gave way
to this house, in this neighborhood,
with soccer fields instead of woods.
A boy tries to throw a ball all the way
from one end of a life to the other.
Like memory, it’s tougher than it looks,
and he worries it lacks that old zip.

So you watch your boy sleep at night,
and you wonder at how an underhand toss
slips the afternoon and stretches across years,
the even stitching of the hours piling on
like subtle rhymes you can barely see,
until with the darkness of the passing day
you tuck your glove away and move along.