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Wee's Puckett poem published in baseball quarterly

By Tom Vogel
August 22, 2006

Baseball enthusiast and St. Olaf College Professor Emeritus of English David L. Wee '61 has had his poem, "The Glove Song of Our Kirby Puckett," published in the premier baseball periodical Elysian Fields Quarterly. The literary baseball journal is designed to provide a venue for those who share a love of baseball and writing.

Wee originally wrote his poem, a parody of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in 1987, after the Twins' World Series championship. "The Glove Song" was one in a series of poetic parodies of famous British and American poems, changing the contents to details about the Twins' victory. In 1990 a chapter in Diamonds in the Rough: The Untold History of Baseball referred to Wee's poems as "among the wittiest" of the genre.

Wee admits that since "The Glove Song" appeared early in Puckett's major league career, "it focuses on his fielding brilliance rather than his great hitting, which at the time had not yet reached Hall-of-Fame standards."

"Perhaps I should have followed up years ago with 'The Bat Song,'" Wee says, "but I didn't."

The poem is reprinted here for fellow fans of the Twins All-Star center fielder, who died March 6.

Puckett
Puckett
The Glove Song of Our Kirby Puckett
Let us go then, you and I,
To where the ceiling is spread out against the sky
Like a canvas igloo that has started to melt and sag in the warming sun.
Let us leave the half-deserted skyways and one-way streets
That lead like a tedious argument
To the overwhelming question...
In the dome the women come and go
Talking of Joe DiMaggio.
The little guy who plants his back against the centerfield wall,
Who crosses himself whenever he comes to bat,
Who licks his tongue at every chance to hit
And every chance to catch a fly ball
Or throw a runner out at third -- all summer long.
Our Kirby has gone to the fence, made a sudden leap,
And brought us to these soft October nights.
In the dome the men, too, come and go
Talking of Joe DiMaggio.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
To leave my seat and descend the stair
To the bathrooms and the brats-and-nachos stand.
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair
And my white World Series sweatshirt on my chest
To buy another beer and take the risk
Of missing one of Kirby's magic grabs.
In the dome the women and men come and go
Talking of Joe DiMaggio.
And whether Kirby might be a better fielder
And, in time, even a better batter than old Joe.
I have measured out my life with Frosty Malt spoons
Amidst the organ music that almost wrecks this place
For human habitation
And I have known the arms already, known them all --
DiMaggio's, Pafko's, Aaron's, Clemente's, Barfield's --
Is it mustard from a brat
That makes me so digress
From Kirby's marvelous glove, which, after all,
As the title reveals, is what this poem is supposed to be about?
I should have had a pair of seats in section 105
To see up close Kirby gliding across the floor of this green sea.
It is impossible to say just what I mean!

No! I am not Sid Hartman, or even his close personal friend,
Full of high sentences. I'm a bit abstruse.
I grow old... I grow old...
The poem grows long. What was that
Overwhelming question anyway?
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
I should have begun like this:
"What would we have done without Kirby's glove?
Could the Twins have come from the dead without it?
Is there a better outfielder in all of baseball?"
And how should I then conclude?
How about this:
In the dome the people come and go
Talking no more of Joe DiMaggio
But only of Kirby Puckett and his glove.
That is what I meant, after all.

-- David Wee, 1987

Contact David Gonnerman at 507-786-3315 or gonnermd@stolaf.edu.