Sunday in the Stadium with Paint

The poetry is in the paint. She is part of the canvas. A dot, a smear among the 42,703. A hundred years ago the fans in the stands would have worn straw hats and suspenders. Sixty years back, white shirts and fedoras. Now the scene is colored jerseys with names and numbers of their imagined selves as if seventeen in perpetuity.

She will paint the smell of mowed grass and hotdogs, the sun and creeping shadows creating increments of green. Her brush will catch the coiled anticipation on faces waiting for Godot, for deliverance, chasing youth like a long fly ball. The artist can never paint still-life again. Neither Cezanne’s apples nor Dutch flowers in a vase. She sees the buzzing fly of death played out on the pitcher’s scowl, the batter’s killer instinct. Hey peanuts, getcha peanuts.

Call it community, these 42,703 living / dying, as if it mattered for a few hours, while players pretend they really care. From a distant perch it is theater and she catches all that in her strokes even as each face becomes a speck in a Jackson Pollock drip. The field is an abstract expressionist splotch of color amid a stretch of negative space … up the alley, off the monetized wall of reds and blues against the mowed lawn, opposing uniforms and the black-attired ump.

Her pigments are in motion; barrel of bat meets stitched ball. Crowd on its feet, hugging or high-fiving. They are transported further than the home run back to their own home in the glory days of youth. They remember the feel of the wood as it met the ball as if life would make sense from now on and everything fit.

Fans know the rhythm of the game, the undulating wave circling the lower deck. They know the high drama of the third act. Many are also in their late innings. Will there be joy in Mudville? Yes, finally. A blooper drops in. A base is stolen. A gust of wind carries the ball. She paints the vicissitudes. The hunches that beat the stats. She dabs some yellow in the corner; the mustard that comes off the hotdog.

She will be part of her own palette, on her feet focused on the vortex at home plate with runner sliding; that horizontal body colliding with the vertical catcher and diagonal umpire leaning over. All this occurs in a cloud of dirt produced by spikes and a hand reaching for the plate in an evasive twist of his torso. Safe or out? Can the artist depict this existential moment? Almost but not quite.