The Holy Baseball Tarot Deck

by Brett Bevell and illustrations by Mikhail Horowitz, February 26, 2007

The sun has exiled its brilliance into the palm of my sleeping hand.

“Kether,” says Osborne, the 12-year-old pitcher. “You’re falling asleep.”

Baseball is poetry. The chi between the bases, like the meridians between acupuncture points on the body, resonates a kind of holiness of the diamond self: the diamond body of the baseball diamond. The diamond sutra is a mantra of “Strike, you’re out, play ball, batter up.”

“Swing the bat effortlessly,” I tell them.

“The umpire hates us,” Osborne says, hitting me with his glove. I smell the leather as his glove covers my face. This is his first year in Little League, and he hates losing.

“Which incarnation is this for you?” I ask him.

“You said it was my first incarnation as a baseball player,” says Osborne. Some other boys are on the dugout bench, looking bored.

“And you said you used to be some guy named William Blake,” snorts Osborne. “You’re Blake the Flake!”

“I was,” I say. “I wrote flaked-out poetry, and made a crazy tarot deck about God and Adam.”

“Strike!,” yells the umpire from behind home plate as one of our players takes a bad swing.

“But now you have a baseball tarot deck,” says Osborne excitedly. His short black hair seems to want to leap off his head when there is mention of my Holy Baseball Tarot Deck.