Working the Post with Big Jim McKean 

 

The animals in this neighborhood are waiting

for someone to talk to them. Pretty soon

they’ll get the picture: we no longer know enough

to see ourselves in their daily foraging.

Or in the red-tail hawk propped like a boy’s

favorite toy on the top shelf of an old oak,

peering longingly into the mute field

of this ritzy campus. What’s this got to do

with basketball, with four aging poets

enacting a slowed-down, heat-drenched game

of 2-on-2? Nothing, everything.

I’m down on the post, giving up 7 inches

and 50 lbs. to Big Jim McKean, who keeps

backing me down, putting me on his hip,

rotating left, right, the 8-foot hook

there every time. Lucky he’s rusty.

Who cares if he’s 20 years my senior—

he’s still got textbook moves he tried once

on a young Cassie Russell, on Kareem

when he was still Lew Alcindor. He times my shot

and swats it at the release.

This morning a rabbit blurred

back into the bushes. Tiny brown squirrels

darting under the trees. A house sparrow

picking at field-house garbage.

Just once I get Jim, if not off his feet

then off his balance, and take him left.

When he reaches out, I show him

my younger brother lefty scoop.

But only Alan’s in shape for all this

stop-and-start; it’s up to him to hit his shots.

Bob’s a natural but one step off

the pick and roll. There’s nothing

to do for the three pigeons

caught inside the fenced-in power station

but offer a small prayer; to transform

the smoke alarm battery squawking

all night into a dream hawk caught in a snare.

This morning Alan used one of my poems

to show a student how he might cut

against the rhapsodic he wears

like a Hawaiian shirt. And how to—

unlike the poem’s last two lines—avoid

falling off emotion’s cliff edge. Let me

leave you then not with the hawk

nor with Jim limping doggedly off court

but with Bob riding shotgun in someone’s car,

grinning. Outside after a long, loud dinner,

just beginning to feel sore, I stick out

my thumb jokingly for a ride. As he floats by,

Bob mouths, gleefully, “Fuck you!”

then flips me the bird. 

 

                                       for Jon Pineda, for Kym Ragusa