It didn’t turn out. I used to make them when I was
younger, not in my childhood but in my second
childhood, the age when I made myself look like
a child to work with children, crouched down
to look in their eyes, spilled baseball cards
across the cafeteria tables and taught them to cut
the heads off with trembling hands and crooked
safety scissors, stitch mosaics out of Donruss blood-
red speckle and Fleer goldenrod — it’s a different
kind of nostalgia but it works, they all work if you
want them to — so while my daughter (who never
found baseball where I left it for her) draws her
name with the Middle School S, I fish an Alvin
Davis card out of the garage, sitting in a loose stack
between a McCovey and a Gossage (next to the
untouched craft kits, across from the tubs packed with
priceless, worthless keepsakes, arrowheads and
steel pennies and ticket stubs, artifacts unearthed
from context and carefully replanted, like sunflower
seeds) so that when the kids think back on that
infinite clutter they’ll remember a smell beyond
my own senses, like the must of my grandmother’s
basement with its forgotten pool table, the abandoned
cardboard boxes that could hide anything, but mostly
wicker baskets and emptied spice tins, the thrill
of being out of earshot and where the air stood
still, so I trace halting lines over the decades-old
photograph, the folds of the fingers curled around the
bat, getting the face all wrong, more like Felix Fermin,
except that under the heat of the oven and the curl
and shrink of the plastic Fermin becomes Gary Gray,
never quite flattens, a distended portrait of distended
memories, a card saved for a lifetime lost in drawers
and basements and garages, surviving on the periphery
of adulthood, a wordless story: just something to put away,
in another drawer, for my daughter to find someday,
a stained-glass window to the past she can’t quite see through.