Baseball Sutra, for Norman Fischer.

Because all green mountains walk, they are permanent.

What does the green mountain do at 3-0? Does it take the pitch & trust in permanence, or does it swing?

Although they walk more swiftly than the wind, someone in the mountains does not realize or understand it.

The green mountain is a catcher, sad in the knees, who reads the pitch & runs.

“In the mountains” means the blossoming of the entire world.

It means the beauty of a passage from first to third on a single to the opposite field. It means the exfoliation of diamond into water, of water into cloud, of cloud into radio voices reduced to silence, the audio's on-deck circle.

People outside the mountains do not realize or understand the mountains walking.

They are on streets or in shops, praying at other altars, staring at their apps, as just past their eyes the mountain walks toward the mound, nursing its fork balls and cutters, change ups and sliders.

Those without eyes to see mountains cannot realize, understand, see, or hear this is as it is.

The vendor in Hiroshima started every call “ICE COLL, ICE COLL.” In the seventh, balloons littered the field, wafts of cigarette smoke ascending into a cacophony of trumpets & drums.

If you doubt mountains' walking, you do not know your own walking: it is not that you do not walk, but that you do not know or understand your own walking.

I do not doubt that the pitcher gives up walks, or that the batter takes his walks, or that the umpire walks to the mound, which walks toward the outfield, away from sharply hit liners or drag bunts, or that whoever walks walks the same path as all those who walked before. The genealogy of walking scatters chalk in its walk.

Since you do know your own walking, you should fully know the green mountains' walking.

My mother said she counted steps, though not for long. My father & I marched down corridors while he barked numbers & hut-huts, chanted martial mantras. I walk with my children, when I'm not driving them. A walk without aim finds counsel under the Koolau.

Green mountains are neither sentient nor insentient.

Our sentience gathers in neurons, ganglia, prions. We are ourselves and not. Our machine becomes us when we walk through letters that on the typewriter end with a ding! Return.

You are neither sentient nor insentient.

I am the sentence that I write. My sentence walks across the screen like a mountain in its folds. Clouds were white-out before that paradigm-shift.

At this moment, you cannot doubt the green mountains' walking.

I choose not to doubt Michael Wacha. He stands on a mound that resembles a mole on the steep mountain's green skin. We hope the rain delay does not last.

Italicized sentences by Zen Master Dogen

[Norman Fischer, a Giants fan, bet me a poem on the Giants-Cardinals game two days ago. I lost, so this is my poem for Norman.]