Part of Eve’s Discussion
It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.
by Marie Howe
from New American Poets
David R. Godine, publisher, 1991
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At its heart, cricket stands as a wonderfully pastoral exercise in deferred gratification. Today, there are various forms of the sport around the world, but to most purists its true and highest expression lies in the international, or “test,” match, involving, say, England playing Australia or India facing Pakistan. Such encounters typically last five full days, with roughly eight hours of actual sport each day and the contestants communally decamping to a hotel each evening and returning to pick up where they left off the following morning. Twice a day, the same players leave the field and stroll back to the pavilion, or clubhouse, for a good meal, and on the warmer afternoons—rarely an issue during matches in England—a uniformed attendant will periodically appear on the field bearing a tray of assorted refreshments. Just to give you a sense of the essentially unhurried nature of the enterprise, a single batter can remain at his post for several hours, if not entire days, on end, and, if sufficiently skillful, accrue upwards of one hundred individual runs before being dismissed. In another of cricket’s cherished rituals, he can expect to be warmly applauded by his opponents on reaching such a milestone.
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