18 Sports poems

Los Angeles Across from the gorgeous dog park, men dream against poodle-pissed trees — their pillows made from breath captured in milk cartons. Only arid, temperate climate offers respite. Let us suppose they have tales, here in this city where filmed stories turn a mint. All around, one wide screen — the dark hills due north pixel-pocked with villa lights. Below, streets hemmed with haggard brown men — jack-in-the-box bodies ever unfolding. Who is pitching this script? Title: “The Child of 1968.” Voiceover:After the Integration Apocalypse, one man must find his way in a land where the sole survivors who look or speak like him are those rendered disturbed and indigent

He waltzes into the lane ’cross the free-throw line, fakes a drive, pivots, floats from the asphalt turf in an arc of black light, and sinks two into the chains. One on one he fakes down the main, passes into the free lane and hits the chains. A sniff in the fallen air— he stuffs it through the chains riding high: “traveling” someone calls— and he laughs, stepping to a silent beat, gliding as he sinks two into the chains.

Dreams brimming over, childhood stretched out in legs, this is the moment replayed on winter days when frost covers the field, when age steals away wishes. Glorious sleep that seeps back there to the glory of our baseball days.

The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love again with the pure geometry of curves, rise toward the ball, falter, and fall away. On the boards their hands and fingertips tremble in tense little prayers of reach and balance. Then, the grind of bone and socket, the caught breath, the sigh, the grunt of the body laboring to give birth to itself. In their toiling and grand sweeps, I wonder, do they still make love to their wives, kissing the undersides of their wrists, dancing the old soft-shoe of desire? And on the long walk home from the VFW, do they still sing to the drunken moon? Stands full, clock moving, the one in army fatigues and houseshoes says to himself,pick and roll, and the phrase sounds musical as ever, radio crooning songs of love after the game, the girl leaning back in the Chevy’s front seat as her raven hair flames in the shuddering light of the outdoor movie, and now he drives, gliding toward the net. A glass wand of autumn light breaks over the backboard. Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout at their backs. The ball turns in the darkening air.

Now his nose’s bridge is broken, one eye will not focus and the other is a stray; trainers whisper in his mouth while one ear listens to itself, clenched like a fist; generally shadowboxing in a smoky room, his mind hides like the aching boys who lost a contest in the Panhellenic games and had to take the back roads home, but someone else, his perfect youth, laureled in newsprint and dollar bills, triumphs forever on the great white way to the statistical Sparta of the champs.

Had to come in out of the people, they blew me about so. Was told of the life taking place elsewhere. Went to check on that, flying late and low over the west. Saw no house, no shade. Sat down on the damp bank on the far shore at the left edge of the world, against which the sea endlessly lapped. So now there were two of us, who beat the world by day and caressed it by night and the world didn’t say yea and she didn’t say nay.

a poem in twelve rounds 1. My head so big they had to pry me out. I’m sorry Bird (is what I call my mother). Cassius Marcellus Clay, Muhammad Ali; you can say my name in any language, any continent: Ali. 2. Two photographs of Emmett Till, born my year, on my birthday. One, he’s smiling, happy, and the other one is after. His mother did the bold thing, kept the casket open, made the thousands look upon his bulging eyes, his twisted neck, her lynched black boy. I couldn’t sleep for thinking, Emmett Till. One day I went Down to the train tracks, found some iron shoe-shine rests and planted them between the ties and waited for a train to come, and watched the train derail, and ran, and after that I slept at night. 3. I need to train around people, hear them talk, talk back. I need to hear the traffic, see people in the barbershop, people getting shoe shines, talking, hear them talk, talk back. 4. Bottom line: Olympic gold can’t buy a black man a Louisville hamburger in nineteen-sixty. Wasn’t even real gold. I watched the river drag the ribbon down, red, white, and blue. 5. Laying on the bed, praying for a wife, in walk Sonji Roi. Pretty little shape. Do you like chop suey? Can I wash your hair underneath that wig? Lay on the bed, Girl. Lie with me. Shake to the east, to the north, south, west— but remember, remember, I need a Muslim wife. So Quit using lipstick. Quit your boogaloo. Cover up your knees like a Muslim wife, religion, religion, a Muslim wife. Eleven months with Sonji, first woman I loved. 6. There’s not too many days that pass that I don’t think of how it started, but I know no Great White Hope can beat a true black champ. Jerry Quarry could have been a movie star, a millionaire, a senator, a president— he only had to do one thing, is whip me, but he can’t. 7. Dressing-Room Visitor He opened up his shirt: “KKK” cut in his chest. He dropped his trousers: latticed scars where testicles should be, His face bewildered, frozen in the Alabama woods that night in 1966 when they left him for dead, his testicles in a Dixie cup. You a warning, they told him, to smart-mouth, sassy-acting niggers, meaning niggers still alive, meaning any nigger, meaning niggers like me. 8. Training Unsweetened grapefruit juice will melt my stomach down. Don’t drive if you can walk, don’t walk if you can run. I add a mile each day and run in eight-pound boots. My knuckles sometimes burst the glove. I let dead skin build up, and then I peel it, let it scar, so I don’t bleed as much. My bones absorb the shock. I train in three-minute spurts, like rounds: three rounds big bag, three speed bag, three jump rope, one- minute breaks, no more, no less. Am I too old? Eat only kosher meat. Eat cabbage, carrots, beets, and watch the weight come down: two-thirty, two-twenty, two-ten, two-oh-nine. 9. Will I go like Kid Paret, a fractured skull, a ten-day sleep, dreaming alligators, pork chops, saxophones, slow grinds, funk, fishbowls, lightbulbs, bats, typewriters, tuning forks, funk clocks, red rubber ball, what you see in that lifetime knockout minute on the cusp? You could be let go, you could be snatched back. 10. Rumble in the Jungle Ali boma ye, Ali boma ye,

I’ve been eating like a sultan since I was two days old. I had a mother and three sisters who worshipped me. When I was two years old they used to plop me in a bed with a jillion satin pillows and spray me with exotic perfumes and lilac water, and then they would shoot me the grapes.

Petals on a river, a tree in blossom, one pink bud—unopened—falls & is carried downstream & out to sea. From above the other petals seem to carry it. Closer— this is our map, these our footprints, we grew up drinking this water. At the start there was doubt, we lit a torch, no one believed we would make it. Closer— the legs, the heart, the lungs. It's too soon to say we were lucky, it's too soon to say anything until the cloud is pulled back from the sky, until the ringing is pulled back from the bells. Look— everyone we've ever known runs without thinking not away but into the cloud, where we are waiting

it’s a strange time which finds me jogging in early morning the deadness of sleep alive in this world the empty parks filled with unloved strangers buildings grey with solitude now near the end of another decade i am witness to the loss of my twenties a promise invisible i run without purpose far from the north star i run with the sound of barking dogs closing in i have lost count of the miles i am older and nothing much matters or has changed