Sigmund Freud And Babe Ruth In Heaven Poem by Hans Ostrom

Sigmund Freud And Babe Ruth In Heaven

Rating: 3.0


Sigmund sits in a cool dugout,
theorizing The Babe,
who daily trots out in Heaven’s perpetual
Spring Training and wrists
pitches over marble walls. The Babe
plays in his underwear, looks like a white
radish atop toothpicks.

Dr. Freud
is addicted to a revulsion he feels for this
Orality of a man, who even in Heaven
devours raw steak, rashers of bacon, barrels
of ale, potatoes, fudge, cigars, brandy.
Ruth’s lips are immense. His voice burbles
up like raw crude. The doctor cannot keep

himself from watching George Herman’s buttocks
flinch when he turns on a pitch. Wearing
a Brooklyn Dodger’s cap, Freud scribbles
notes toward a paradigm of Baseball As Dream.
At home plate, Bambino belches, breaks wind.
The doctor is discontent. Apparently, there’s
no treatment for this Promethean-American adolescent-
voracious as a bear, incorrigible as a cat.

Babe calls Sigmund “Doc, ” of course.
When they play catch, Babe bends curves
and floats knucklers-junk for bespectacled Doc,
who squints and shies when ball slaps mitt. The ball
falls out as often as not. Sometimes, though,

a principled grin grows on Freud’s grizzled face.
For the doctor is day-dreaming he’s a boy
in Brooklyn-that Herr Ruth, Der Yank, is his step-father.
When the ball does slip snugly into dark webbing,
no sting, Freud feels the power of Catch as Ritual.
Hey, there you go, Doc! growls His Babeness—
and spits brownly, O prodigiously onto Heaven’s green.

Friday, May 16, 2014
Topic(s) of this poem: psychological
COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Yen Cress 19 October 2007

What a great imagination you have! The Babe and Sig together? Who woulda thot!

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