This is a poem about baseball because baseball is a way of writing about Bowering whose whole life, at least the parts of it not bound up in basketball and poetry and history, is all bound up in baseball.

Baseball is the American way of escape, the American way to forget. Canadians have no such way of forgetting because hockey cannot be a means of forgetting. It is just too noisy and too dangerous like the world at large.

The great green expanse of the outfield is no place at all to throw a dead octopus, which nevertheless looks absolutely perfect on the narrow oval of the ice. Can you imagine an umpire, in his dignified blue suit, holding a dead octopus in his hands? Whereas in the hands of a hockey referee in his striped jersey, a dead octopus looks perfectly natural, and even, somehow, right.

Hockey is a bruise or a concussion and hockey is a game where a majority of Canadians play out of American cities even though the majority of stars were born in Canada. Those who want to understand American free trade should look at hockey. Where else in the world can a boy from Brantford end up in Hollywood and then in St. Louis and finally the Big Apple? Like the song says, it's a long way. Whereas baseball has mainly American players and only one or two Canadians, even though Canadians play the game every spring even before the ice is really melted out of the ground and even before the puddles are dried along the first base line. Sometimes, in some cities, you have to run through crackling ice just to get to first base.

George writes about hockey too, but it is not his first love. He loves baseball first last and always, and of course he is right. There is no game in the world that combines meditation, exact statistical knowledge and physical action in as complete and harmonious a blend as baseball. Of all the games in the world besides Poker, baseball is the most poetic and revealing of certain parts of the human soul.

If Americans were truly as good as baseball, they would surely be the greatest people on earth, and because they have invented the game - even though Russians and Europeans haven't got on to it yet - this baseball tells the world that the Americans are a truly advanced people. The American government is not equal in even the smallest way to baseball in its near perfection.

Baseball is the American way of forgetting. At the ballgame the crowd is moved by a spirit of uselessness so profound and so delightful they forget that their government is bombing the shit out of some poor people half-way around the globe, and that guns made in America are being used to kill people everywhere.

It is like a home run, or like the smart missiles that supposedly slid like perfect curve balls into the doors of the bunkers in Iraq. Once the ball has disappeared over the fence and into the pocket of some lucky fan, it's fate is forgotten. There is a whole big black bag full of white white balls - an infinite supply.

There are more baseballs at a professional ball game than there are pigeons, even though a single ball is all that has ever been required to play an entire game, provided of course that the ball does not get lost in the tall grass, which has been mainly eliminated from baseball fields everywhere, even in Canada. The fate of baseballs is to wind up on little cone-shaped, gold-coloured whatchamacallits on the shelves and mantlepieces of lucky fans. Sometimes they are covered with the signatures of ball-players.

Baseballs are all so white and smooth, their laces feel so satisfying to the touch, and they all smell of new leather - the old, dry, bleached skin of some dead animal, cut into shapes like elongated figure eights or infinity signs. To make one baseball, two of these figure-eights are stitched together like a three-dimensional yin-yang symbol with exactly one-hundred and eight criss-crossed stitches. Inside, one finds about a quarter block length of four different kinds of string, surrounding a small, round, gummy rubber ball.

You wouldn't think there could be as many live horses in the world today to make as many baseballs as fly over the fences of stadiums in American cities in a single baseball season. The relation of the players to this ball is like the relation of the Olympian Gods to the earth itself. The aim of the batter is to make the ball go so far away that it is forgotten forever and must be replaced by a new one.

Baseball is the apotheosis of world religion, the ultimate spectacle of power both human and divine. The well-known French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once drove a Buick all around the United States, sampling American life. Afterwards he wrote a book called America, long after George Bowering had written a book by the same name. George also wrote a book called Baseball, but Jean Baudrillard never wrote such a book. He saw Michael Jackson, but he did not see baseball. If he had seen baseball, it is hard to know whether he might have found some hope, or whether his despair and nihilism would only have been deepened.

Every other kind of American culture goes everywhere. Europeans eat hot dogs, hamburgers, watch American soap-operas and sit-coms, admire the bodies of American actors, visit Euro-Disney sites, eat at McDonalds, and talk in American slang, but they do not watch baseball because baseball is a secret and a mystery which only Americans can fully understand.

The Japanese play baseball because they too understand that baseball is a kind of mystery. The Latin Americans play baseball because they too are Americans, and because baseball provides them with access to the United States and its huge sums of money. Fidel Castro plays baseball and so does his brother, Raoul. Even though they hate the United States, they cannot bring themselves to hate baseball.

I know all this because Lionel Kearns, who was George Bowering's best friend, once went to Cuba and played in a game with them. He wanted George to go along with him, but George for some reason couldn't go, so Lionel went by himself and had the privilege of facing Raoul's pitching. Perhaps the Cubans thought that by learning baseball they would be able to pitch a missile into the heart of Washington, just as Washington pitched missiles into the heart of Baghdad. This, of course, was before John Kennedy came along and took away the ball. Does Cuba manufacture its own baseballs?

Baseball is a game of tiny exquisite tensions. Nine tenths of baseball is half-waiting for something to happen, or as Yogi Berra once said, ninety percent of the game is half mental. Waiting for a hit is like waiting for a kiss or a slap in the face.

Every pitch, including the first one, is preceded by a series of small gestures and rituals, involving every muscle of the human body from the back and biceps to the tips of the fingers and the corners of the mouth and eyes. A complete and self-sufficient language of word and gesture more mysterious and obscure than the entire liturgy of the Catholic and Buddhist churches is pressed to the service of describing this one American game.

The pitcher mounts the mound. The catcher adjusts his equipment. The umpire relaxes and looks around. The pitcher picks up the resin bag and drops it, all according to a script rehearsed and rerehearsed with every pitch by every pitcher everywhere. The catcher squats sexily and wiggles his fingers in his crotch. The pitcher nods or shakes his head before going into his wind-up. The batter beats the dirt from his cleats with his bat, adjusts his jersey and sets his plastic cap upon his head. The third base coach scratches himself, takes off his hat, puts it back on again and crosses his hands in front of his breast as he kicks up a puff of dirt.

Everyone looks on and tries to guess which of these gestures contains meaning and which does not. Even the gestures which do not contain meaning contain the meaning of deception, of increasing mystery and suspense until the ball is finally thrown.

A whole series of binaries are suddenly brought into motion by every single throw. Will it be a ball or will it be a strike? In the average game of baseball, this series of rituals is enacted more than a hundred times by both pitchers, each time with a slightly different meaning, depending upon the score, the inning and the particular batter at the plate. Every pitch requires a new decision, a new agreement, according to a predetermined script.

Why three strikes and three outs, instead of ten as in cricket, four balls instead of five, four bases instead of three, nine players instead of ten? Of course, there is the underlying structure of the chase and the escape, as William Carlos Williams once so cunningly pointed out. And, of course, the error. All to no end save beauty, Dr. Williams says.

Two segments of a circle, two pieces of pie, one within the other, circumscribe the geometry of the game. The ball that falls outside the piece of pie is foul, the ball inside is fair and the ball that passes beyond the outer edge of the portion of the circle that is the playing field is the apotheosis of the game: the home run. Going, going, gone.

The bat is a nuclear accelerator, the ball, a proton, until the hit, an undifferentiated bit of matter floating around loose in the universe, stuck on a two way track between the pitcher's hand and the catcher's glove. It needs the bat to make it real, to give it meaning. Only when the ball or the proton is struck do we know or care about its direction and its velocity. Up to that moment, it remains completely predictable, and afterwards makes a bid to become a lesser or a greater mystery, an out, a hit, a homer.

John Newlove, who is a cultural nationalist, prefers hockey to baseball. He says what kind of game is it where the perfect game is one in which nothing happens?

Homer of course was the greatest of the heroic poets and a homer is the greatest of heroic acts in America. Ronnie Reagan played baseball as a boy, and so did George Bush, while Billy Clinton played the saxophone. Just ask anybody. They'll tell you that Babe Ruth is more famous than Lester Young or Thelonious Monk, and Elvis is more famous than either of them, and all of them are more famous than practically any American poet. Did Elvis play baseball as a boy, or was he always a truck driver before he became a singer?

See how baseball connects to everything? You begin to talk about baseball and, sooner or later, everything in America is included. Did you know that the famous American poet, Marianne Moore, was once escorted to a baseball game by a blue-blooded Boston journalist, but was more interested in watching the way the pigeons flew out from under the deck in centre-field than she was in watching the players playing? This is how I came to know that poetry is a bit like baseball, because poetry, like baseball, is a game of chance in which the elements of success are like the elements of a home run. They are both the result of a kind of accident of attention or intention, or inattention.

You just happen to be looking in the direction that the pigeons are flying. Or amidst the noise of the crowd, you hear the sudden uprushing restrained thunder of their beating wings. Just at the moment your attention is distracted from the game, something is bound to happen, and you miss everything.

Or sometimes, when you are playing, you merely want to get a piece of the ball, but ball and bat end up on a common trajectory and away she goes, and you don't know how or why and can't repeat it no matter how hard you try. In fact, the harder you try, the more impossible the home run becomes, just like a poem. Of course, a certain habit of mind and stance and movement will increase the chances of putting one out of the park, as they say.

So much is accident, so much mere chance. I started to write a poem about George Bowering and ended up writing a poem about baseball. But if I had never met George Bowering I might not have written any poems ever in my life. There is nothing logical or even fated about this, just some randomized obscurity, it seems to me. I watched him do it and said to myself if he can do it, I can do it, too. And so I did and this is about as close to home as I will ever get.