Team Flame nine fires in the game

Some batters arrive at the plate carrying heft. Some bring grace. Some survive enough innings to become myth. They’re all here and part of Team Flame. Nine batters in burnings and meditations, spirits and fires, spectacles and labors, longings and memories.

They are dangerous

poetic

beautiful.

Bodies on fire, smoking bats.

Arms on fire, blazing flames.

At the plate: combustions, strikeouts, and arguments over “the call.” Baseball has its injustices. Some pitches catch too much plate. Others miss by a whisper but are called strikes.

In baseball, and in writing, everyone makes judgments, but only the umpire’s call, or writer’s call matters. On the field, they’re getting ready: Hannibal is hunkered behind home plate, Stokes and Poe linger near the foul lines at first and third. Rae and Anora watch from the deep outfield corners, and Charlie, the bat boy, carries good luck lumber through hits, outs, and dust. Leftie, Tommy, and Cory, arms in the bullpen, wait their turn.

Batters step into the box beneath stadium lights and desert stars. Some swing wildly; some bunt and disappear into dust; some wait and walk; and some return to the dugout looking as though they’d seen seen a ghost.

And everywhere, on the field and off the field, a steady dialogue is pitched between grace and judgment, foul balls and home runs, a forest fire and a campfire.

Which flame bats first?

LEADOFF BATTER

Number 11, Left Field, WINDBURN

(Coaches note: makes contact . . . always)

A bush bursting into flame? No. But I’ve seen lesser scorchings: a grass fire, my hair torched by candles on a birthday cake, the burning asphalt of Phoenix highways riding my motorcycle; the hot breath of July crossing deserts with the sting of air against my skin at eighty miles per hour.

The prophets received pillars of fire; Moses the eternal flame. I only get UV warnings and dehydration. But revelation always begins in these emptying’s and abrasions, so voided and cut, I’ll aim for the pitch when it comes in hot and burning.

That’s what team flame does, we’re nine batters chasing heat.

Settling into my dharma, I accept sunburn, UV exposure, windburn, and have learned to handle the flaming fire and hot fast ball in hopes that one stunning pitch will morph into a burning bush.

BATTING SECOND

Number 4, Short Stop, ASPHALT

(Coaches note: the fastest runner)

On desert rides heat is built into the asphalt like a burning memory. In the desert’s hot waves, I recall Midwest summers when ball fields baked under August suns and my heart learned how quickly it could burn and how slowly it could mend.

Summer, heat, the Midwest, and the roads aflame.

It’s where I learned that blacktop exists, like the umpires’, to enforce the commandments:

endure

continue

drink water

keep moving west.

In thousands of controlled explosions, the Road King beneath me carries on its liturgy of squeeze, suck, bang, and blow. An engineer’s internal fire carrying external longing. It’s easy for engineers to mistake motion for transcendence. I have too.

BATTING THIRD

Number 5, Third Base, COAL

(Coaches note: the best hitter)

In the lineup’s three hole, the hitter must have power and make contact. In the summer season of my life, when I was full of velocity and ambition, I was that power aiming for contact whenever heat met me and drove me forth in radiant passages. In ways, I was Hopkins’ just man in going graces even when dark heat charred the fields of my heart and scarred me like burning coal.

There are fast burnings, and fast pitches that no one sees, not even the best batter:

The marriage ending.

The phone call at midnight.

The friend falling into addiction.

The exhausted preacher speaking hope he can no longer feel.

The father’s sour grapes setting the edges in the teeth and heels of others.

Fires burning with heat, flames without smoke, contact ancient and new.

CLEANUP BATTER

Number 14, First Base, ANTELOPE RANCH

(Coaches note: power and contact)

Motorcycling headlong into July’s hot wind, I was nearly there when I turned onto a dirt road and rumbled fifteen miles over boulders and ditches strewn with whitewashed bones: antelope skeletons, scattered ribs, skulls bleached by sun.

I was on the way to Antelope Ranch, Wyoming. Say it out loud now and hear how the word rolls off your tongue:

| An-tel-lope |

| An-te-lope |

| An-te-lope |

Alerted by the deep-throated rumble from my Harley, my host met me at the driveway. “We’ve never had anyone come up here on a bike.”

I parked my hot bike in his barn among the horses, sheep, and chickens. When the engine’s potato-potato-potato fell silent, the chickens clucked once and then Antelope Ranch settled.

Flowers bloomed in the yard. Dogs leapt. A baby crawled through grass. Antelope grazed the meadow while magpies gossiped in cottonwoods.

A home run. The bones were alive.

BATTING FIFTH

Number 77, Third Base, DESERT DUST

(Coaches note: all hit or miss, takes a big swing)

Sitting on rocks, I recalled Gary Snyder’s line about getting closer to real matter: rock, air, fire, wood, is more spiritual.

Under the tree and above the hard ground, matter and spirit no longer seemed separate categories. In Wyoming’s Red Desert, I was not in Plato’s school of pure thought and logic, but in the empirical school where heat itself became instruction.

Everything was dusty, dry, and hot. Lizards, spiders, ants, and dust taught the matter of man as sweat dripped from my forehead onto my notebook pages. My pen bled into the parchment as I pushed it along and took all the big word swings I could muster.

Truth force said, “Your best thinking got you here.” I lay in desert dust, my tongue hanging out, waiting for a baptism, doubting my best thinking.

The old ones walked into the wilderness to battle demons. In my summer, I entered wilderness riding over air-cooled cylinders, carrying water. Different century. Different batboy. Different dust. Same thirst. Same ghosts.

BATTING SIXTH

Number 97, Center Field, SHAPESHIFTER

(Coaches note: the sneakiest batter in the lineup)

Walking behind him in New Delhi, he turned and laughed at me. His brown buttocks visible through threadbare pants, a thrush testing the limits of cover.

He turned into an alley. Fifteen seconds later I followed.

He was gone.

No doors.

No windows.

No exits.

A blackbird remained on the narrow asphalt corridor.

It cried once, lifted upward like a funeral in feathers, laughed again, then vanished.

I still do not know how.

In Diné land, the border of Utah and Arizona, grandfather became a roadrunner for his brown metamorphosis. I glimpsed him ducking behind a pinyon pine as he disappeared.

“Where did Grandfather go?” his granddaughter asked.

“I don’t know. He was just here,” Grandmother said.

I still do not know.

BATTING SEVENTH

Number 12, Second Base, FALSE FIRE (Coaches note: known for the glove and turning the double play)

I spent years looking for the dramatic burning bush while overlooking the smaller flames surrounding me.

The welder’s torch

Lantern light at the cabin

Woodstoves in February

The flare of match heads

Campfire smoke and flame registered in flannel jackets

The orange tip of sunset over Arizona’s red rocks, Hawaiian Pacific swells, or azure Wisconsin lakes.

Moses would have missed the light too if he had been waiting for the big spectacle.

But now that I know, I’ll listen for the still small voice, watch the silent sphere, a sparkling ember, disappear into the catcher’s cave.

A bright planet disguised as a baseball.

BATTING EIGHTH

Number 21, Catcher, BURNING CIVILIZATION

(Coaches note: all we ask, coyote catcher, is put the ball in play)

Now another heat covers the land.

Political heat and the burning outrage economy.

The modern world, accelerating into bigger combustions and:

faster news

faster anger

faster collapse

faster forgetting.

And on July 4, every child with a sparkler held too close to dry grass, spark to flame to fire.

There is another way the desert teaches:

Sit still, like lizard.

Drink deeply, like mule.

Wave quietly, like sage.

Listen longer, like cactus.

Watch shadow move over stone, like coyote.

Slow your expectations,

bring the heat down,

throw a knuckler,

don’t blame the eighth hole batter.

How could number 21, Burning Civilization, possibly lay wood on a glowing sphere disappearing into leather, a fireball cauterizing the catcher’s glove, animating the engineer’s wet dream like the poetry of internal combustion: squeeze, suck, bang, and blow, the Freudian ID in a knuckled muffler.

BATTING NINTH

Number 68, Pitcher, FLAME THROWER

(Coaches note: don’t expect much, a hit is a miracle)

I’ve still not seen the burning bush, but I do see small flames, even miracles from STORYTELLERS:

All those listening. All those walking.

All those meditating. All those making music.

All those riding bicycles. All those Mother Joneses.

All those practicing yoga. All those keeping pledges.

All those painters and fixers. All those readers and thinkers.

All those tapping natural energy. All those canoeing quiet water.

All those easing into gentleness. All those making local decisions.

All those recyclers and myth-busters.

All those choosing herbs and acupuncture.

All those bailing on the bruising, busted, boisterous business world.

Not one tree ablaze in the wilderness, but the nine hole batter getting a hit, a faint flame against enormous odds . . . a minor miracle; but lets celebrate this DUMB LUCK.

Its a number nine batter with a hit; its millions of ordinary people carefully tending embers through the night.

Look, the burning bush.

Burning excerpts from Stories Emerge Like Bears, a Cornerstone Press forthcoming lyric memoir in 2028 exploring wilderness, memory, labor, rhythm, motorcycles, drumming, fire, and the sacred atmospheres and languages of place.