Paper Weight

My own wallet is thin, just plastic and debt,

sliding out of my pocket at the station for gas.

But his was a brick of things he couldn't forget,

swollen with scraps and the years as they pass.

I found the card in a drawer full of grit,

smelling of cedar and old, worked-in hide.

He’d kept a box score, the ink almost quit,

of a baseball game played on the town’s West Side.

Nineteen seventy-four, a Thursday in June,

folded so tight that the crease is a tear.

He carried that win like a lucky old tune,

a piece of the sun he could actually wear.