In Memory of the Utah Stars

Each of them must have terrified his parents by being so big, obsessive and exact so young, already gone and leaving, like a big tipper, that huge changeling’s body in his place. The prince of bone spurs and bad knees. The year I first saw them play Malone was a high school freshman, already too big for any bed, 14, a natural resource. You have to learn not to apologize, a form of vanity. You flare up in the lane, exotic anywhere else. You roll the ball off fingers twice as long as your girlfriend’s. Great touch for a big man, says some jerk. Now they’re defunct and Moses Malone, boy wonder at 19, rises at 20 from the St. Louis bench, his pet of a body grown sullen as fast as it grew up. Something in you remembers every time the ball left your fingertips wrong and nothing the ball can do in the air will change that. You watch it set, stupid moon, the way you watch yourself in a recurring dream. You never lose your touch or forget how taxed bodies go at the same pace they owe, how brutally well the universe works to be beautiful, how we metabolize loss as fast as we have to.