Pinch Hitter

A kid in a faded Spider-man t-shirt

catches flies popped
by his wiffle-bat wielding father
in the middle of a balding field
behind the muffler repair place.
A robot of welded-together car parts
stands sentinel on the roof, 
tailpipe arm frozen mid-wave.
One warm night the boy and his friends 
scaled the dumpster behind the building 
and from there scrambled onto the roof

(its tarpaper littered with lost Spaldeens and frisbees),

where they proceeded to drape a jacket

and a baseball hat on the robot.

It's still thus adorned, a scarecrow 
overlooking the street. The mechanics 
find it amusing, not least because the boss doesn't,

keeps telling them to climb on up there

and strip it back down to a metal skeleton.

The boy smiles whenever he happens to glance at it,

silhouetted against the late afternoon sun.

His father doesn't notice it at all, lost

in a swirl of grim static emanating from somewhere else.

The only thing connecting the man and the boy
is the trajectory of the ball, an invisible arc

traced through the blinding summer sunlight.
The father doesn't talk, just keeps thwocking
those hollow balls into orbit. 

Thrusting up his glove, the boy makes a tiny, idle wish.

Later that evening, the cicadas' song is interrupted

by a clanking and scraping, as something pulls itself loose

and runs across the field, skirting the ditch full of tires

and spiderwebbed windshields at its far end.

The next morning the boy inadvertently sleeps in,

accustomed to being barked awake and bullied

into his clothes. The house does not smell

like coffee. He creeps

down the carpeted hall to his father's room, stopping

and standing very, very still

when he sees the puddle of rust seeping

from under the door.