STATE LINES
California Poetry
Before plying his trade in majorleague baseball, Satchel Paige barnstormed in the original California Winter League. For poet Chiyuma Elliot, the Hall of Famer is an embodiment of American restlessness and desire. Several poems honoring the pitcher appear in Elliot’s first book, “California Winter League.” Her meditative lines shrink the larger-thanlife Paige to a human scale. His “long-lost love” is just a bus window carrying him to his next gig. Time passes him by, and perhaps history as well — the poem is set in 1934, 13 years before Jackie Robinson’s arrival in the majors. Nevertheless, Paige is a star by any standard. From 1931 to 1936, he posted an unfathomable 50-2 record in the CWL.
CALIFORNIA WINTER LEAGUE
( for Satchel Paige)
(1934) If I were your mother, I’d say you were resting your eyes as we roll out of Kansas, resting from the stubby fields of wheat, from the “White” and “Colored” signs on gas station bathrooms and the look on my face. You’re dreaming like a rookie: silk shirts, girls, late model cars. But things can get lost in the sun. I’ve left my suitcase on the team bus and come back to find it gone. I’ve left my heart with a girl and come back to find her staring down into a cup of coffee, and too grown-up to pay me any mind. The road grows like a weed, it grows and your house grows too quiet — like a baby, you need a car ride to fall asleep, and you start dreaming like a veteran: vinyl seats, stolen bases, reasons to play when your shoulder’s sore — on those nights, the bus window is your long-lost love. Out this window, three small boys are playing stickball with an old tin can, and a woman’s sweeping her porch with a homemade broom, and a jackrabbit’s running away. And I want to wake you up so you can see it go by: fast as an eye blink, fast as pitch.
Chiyuma Elliot is the author of “California Winter League” (Unicorn Press; 2015) and the soon-to-be-released poetry collection “Vigil.” A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she teaches in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley.