Sigmund Freud and Babe Ruth

My favorite pair of roommates in an imaginary heaven (of sorts) is Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley, chiefly because they constitute the first pair I put in a poetic heaven. In second position is the pair of Sigmund Freud and Babe Ruth. All poets are notoriously if not intentionally fuzzy about how the idea (or image or phrase) for a poem arose. In this instance, I think I knew I wanted to pair Freud with someone. I associate Freud with appetites (literal and figurative), so I believe I then jumped from that association to Babe Ruth, he of legendary appetites, and then I probably thought Ruth would indeed do well as a contrast to Freud because Ruth's profession was physical, not intellectual. And of course Freud was all about the perils of early childhood, so "Babe" is a lucky nickname. Both were "giants," of a kind, in the 20th century. As Elvis is profane in contrast to the "sacred" Emily, so Freud (I guess) is sacred to the vulgar Ruth--or whatever (or quid-quid, as a friend likes to say). In any event, I thought that one kind of heaven, from Freud's perspective, would be a place where he would encounter an enormous problem to solve, psychologically. Babe Ruth is his problem, and that's a good thing. Here's the poem.

Sigmund Freud and Babe Ruth in Heaven

by Hans Ostrom

Sigmund sits in a cool dugout,
theorizing The Babe,
who daily trots out in Heaven’s perpetual
Spring Training and wrists
pitches over marble walls. The Babe
plays in his underwear, looks like a white
radish atop toothpicks. Dr. Freud

is addicted to a revulsion he feels for this
Orality of a man, who even in Heaven
devours raw steak, rashers of bacon, barrels
of ale, potatoes, fudge, cigars, brandy.
Ruth’s lips are immense. His voice burbles
up like raw crude. The doctor cannot keep

himself from watching George Herman’s buttocks
flinch when he turns on a pitch. Wearing
a Brooklyn Dodger’s cap, Freud scribbles
notes toward a paradigm of Baseball As Dream.
At home plate, Bambino belches, breaks wind.
The doctor is discontent. Apparently, there’s
no treatment for this Promethean-American adolescent--
voracious as a bear, incorrigible as a cat.

Babe calls Sigmund “Doc,” of course.
When they play catch, Babe bends curves
and floats knucklers--junk for bespectacled Doc,
who squints and shies when ball slaps mitt. The ball
falls out as often as not. Sometimes, though,

a principled grin grows on Freud’s grizzled face.
For the doctor is day-dreaming he’s a boy
in Brooklyn--that Herr Ruth, Der Yank, is his step-father.
When the ball does slip snugly into dark webbing,
no sting, Freud feels the power of Catch as Ritual.
Hey, there you go, Doc! growls His Babeness—
and spits brownly, O prodigiously onto Heaven’s green.

from The Coast Starlight (2006), by Hans Ostrom