Sex, Death, and Baseball by David Moreau
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

“Sex, Death and Baseball”
Poetry
Moon Pie Press, 2004

When I read David Moreau’s poem, “Borrowed Time,” in George Bilgere’s “Poetry Town” blog, I hadn’t known that the collection from which it was taken, Sex, Death, and Baseball, had been published in 2004. But not only did I admire the poem – a poem about death – the title of the collection was irresistible. In his commentary Bilgere wrote about the poem, I admire how this poem speaks to the two contradictory truths that define us: we all lead lives that are more or less the same. And we all lead lives that are utterly different. Naturally, I wanted to consider the collection more deeply; I wanted to write a review.

The love poems address married love, continual longing, the awakening of desire.  In “Light My Fire,” the poet recalls seeing the Doors on the Ed Sullivan Show, as an adolescent in 1967, acutely aware of the girls in his friend’s living room with whom he is watching, and he is mesmerized.

I saw them drooling and saw
the skinny breasts that hung down
inside of Jennie’s shirt as well.
I was Aladdin outside the cave
with no magic words and only
the vaguest idea of the treasure within.
And it was a long time after
sixth grade and Bradford, Pennsylvania,
before I would learn how to share
that incredible fire.

 In “Tantramar,” Moreau recalls “one year in Canada” when the poet and his wife stayed in a motel called “Tantramar,” also the name of a fort on the border of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, how in the motel

we touched each other, entered the ancient dance.
And you became a wind that grows in strength
in the night, so that I was like a man who hears
a storm against the house, goes to the door
and opens it and finds it nearly pulled off the hinges,
the trees swaying violently and limbs down in the yard.
We entered that wind and I am grateful.

“The Truth About Marriage,” on the other hand, takes place two decades after their marriage, and all he can think about is sex. She’s lost interest in the passion, though, and only wants to be held.

The truth is that sex distracts me from death.
This pleasure so complete affirms the life
of our bodies.

And so death enters the stage! Sex and death (and baseball!), entwined like DNA, inseparable.

As well as “Borrowed Time,” the death poems include “Cultivating Joy” with its recurring line, “My new life begins this moment,” and an overheard conversation in “At the Diner”:

The old woman tells them,
“She had pain. She should
have told someone. She should
have called her son.”

The fact of death is overheard over a plate of haddock and beans. Equally prosaic, “For Roger Who Died at Work” and a poem called “Beverly,” about a woman in a home for the developmentally disabled who continually asks, “What is heaven like?” The section of death-themed poems ends, naturally, on “Fear.”

And this inevitably brings us to baseball, right?

A New Englander, Moreau lives in Maine and roots for the Red Sox. It’s important to remember that at the time Sex, Death, and Baseball was published, the Red Sox still had not won a World Series championship in nearly a century, though they would that very year. “The Curse of the Bambino” poignantly hung over Boston baseball for eighty-six years. Indeed, the poems, “A History of Wanting” and “Hope” are saturated with the disappointment of “Red Sox Nation,” though the first, after recounting all the heartbreaking losses – Yaz popping up to Bucky Dent in 1978, Bill Buckner flubbing a ground ball in 1986 and all the rest (Dalton Jones, Jeff Sellers, Jim Lonborg) – the poem ends, “When

the Red Sox win the World Series we will lose
a great knowledge of wanting.”
But already I see the fastball thrown belt high
to Ortiz with bases loaded and think,
this year, this year. 

And indeed, the Red Sox finally broke the curse in the 2004 season. Just as Hemingway elevated bullfighting to a metaphysical plane, a meta-drama about “death in the afternoon,” so Moreau depicts the drama of the Red Sox fans of yore, the knowledge of wanting, the annual disappointments. But now, three World Series championships under their belt, the Red Sox are just another ballclub playing out the season.Ditto the Cubs. In “Hope” it’s his ancient great uncle who carried that weight of hope for his star-crossed team.

Sex, Death, and Baseball may indeed be the great triumvirate that explains the simple riddle of existence. Moreau’s poems are full of such convincing honesty.