An Alabama Pitts Poem

Alabama Pitts, What Did You Learn

What did you learn in Sing Sing?
the open field run, the stiff arm,
how to break the 220 down?
your dark little mother came up
from Georgia to walk through that
iron door with her famous son,
the world for one moment
at your feet, a young TIMES stringer
flashing the image with caught breath
forward nearly seventy glossy years.

Where did you think you were going?
the next Sisler, the next Wagner,
the second coming of the peach?
smoke, all, when the curves began
to drop in Albany, when the game
was coffin tight with best players
every boy wanted to be somehow,
and Dizzy and Paul were re-talking
the language in St. Louis is that
resolve in your face, or the hardness

of steel bars in gray eyes six years
up the river of missed women and
running catches that stopped
at concertina wire, contracts and
crowds always waiting just
beyond the robbery sentence,
and mother come to get her boy
in her best dress wearing a hat
she could hardly afford. Alabama,
what did you learn in Sing Sing?