Was going through a box of old papers from the basement this morning and found this poem handwritten on a yellow legal sheet that had the phone numbers for my friends Alex and Jon, and my dad. I wrote it down sometime in the late 1990s. Also on the sheet there was the birth info for some baseball players not born on US soil.

Meulens, Hensley, June 23, 1967 Curacao Netherlands Antilles

Burt Blyleven, b:April 6, 1951 Zeist Netherlangs

Bruce Bochy Landes de Bussac France

Mike Blowers Weizburg W Germany

Win Remmerswaal March 8, 1954 The Hague Netherlands

Okay, onto the poem.

World Was In the Face of the Beloved

World was in the face of the beloved–,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world can not be grasped.

Why didn’t I, from the full, beloved face
as I raised it to my lips, why didn’t I drink
world, so near that I couldn’t almost taste it?

Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also, with too much
world, and, drinking, I myself ran over.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

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