Mesa Historical Museum

With my All Baseball All-the-Time Spring Training trip on its last day, I had a stop scheduled at the Mesa Historical Museum. Any museum that allows photography is likely to be worth a visit, but one that has an exhibit devoted to spring training baseball -- the so-called Cactus League -- had to be on my itinerary. It was well worth the visit, which was sandwiched between minor league practice and a Subway lunch and before the minor league games.

The baseball exhibit was not large but informative and had several photographs of Ernie Banks along with other stars. A nice collection showed several stages of turning a slab of hardwood into a baseball bat and they selected Banks for that display as well, a nice touch for me. The other rooms showed various items of interest to Mesa history, and wrapped around the outside of the museum is a collection of various farm implements that helped develop a city in the midst of a desert. Interesting and eye-catching.

Only a week ago I was headed for the museum and now I have processed my pictures and published my poems. A real whirlwind of a spring vacation. Some poems from Mesa:

SURPRISE ARIZONA

One of the suburbs of Phoenix on the Cactus League map is Surprise,
But I found my surprise in Mesa rather than in Surprise.
The air was hot even though just about eighty, no surprise;
The lack of humidity meant you would not sweat, no surprise;
Night falls quickly and turns quite cool, also no surprise.
I pulled out of the stadium lot today, drove along the Mesa Cemetery,
And noticed that dozens if not hundreds of gravesites are flooded,
Hidden under several inches of standing water. Surprise!

ALL BASEBALL

A lone poet on a baseball vacation, just three days but filled with action,
All baseball, all the time, no exception, be it three big league games,
Be it two minor league practices or two minor league games,
Be it an old-timers game with pictures and autographs,
Be it a visit to a softball field dressed as Yankee Stadium,
Or be it a trip through a local museum on Cactus League Baseball.
All baseball, all the time, extends even to lunch away from the park
Spent reading Shoeless Joe; extends even to the writing of this poem.

FARM IMPLEMENTS

Visiting Mesa for Chicago Cub Spring Training, I included the Museum
Which features a school-room sized exhibit of baseball pictures,
Enjoying the fact that Ernie Banks and the Cubs are features of the show.
After a turn through the rooms one should look at the outside collection,
Threshers and tractors and seeders and cultivators and sowers
All corroding in silence under the relentless Arizona sun.
Once I got home I looked at the photos and wondered
How tough were the settlers who took on the desert,
Defeating the sand and the sun and the drought to carve out a home,
And as I thought about the tools in the museum yard, I thought
Congratulations and Rust in Peace.