- The Island
Cross-court I would study my fathersquatting under black banners as he etchedin the playbook a flash pivot and flex cutor the weak-side back-screen for "Ducklips"to leap away with the rim, as he did oncein Quebradillas, driving his forearmthrough the metal pith, spinning it at half-court,a trophy on a spit. I rememberin the mezzanine Panama-hatted mencussing and counting cash, their daiquirisarriving perpetually on island time,while the scorekeeper limped off to somemarshland autoshop for the drill and solder.Midsummer nights the Piratas' fanswould crow-swarm our open-air arena,wielding toxic sweat, each oil-paintedpectoral dripping black tears of it;some came midstream from the Guajataca,fish guts still glinting under their fingertips,and others seemed to materializeout of a montage of fists, the silt filigreeon my sisters' sun-baked necks, the boilon my brother's wrist roused by a buriedcactus needle, or the eleven pockmarkson my ankles after red ants gushed outour toco polo tree. But I remember bestthose defeated nights I wallowedbeneath rollout bleachers imaginingeach half-court play strung up and passing,like a parade of migratory birds—a learned, companionable rhythmturning under my father's constellation. [End Page 65] On the way home he would set me on his lapto steer the broad dust-gaps as he grumbledover a last-second ball-screen, a botchedisolation, digging for his pen. By heartI knew his luxuriant scrawl, the curlingJ of his signature like a breakerat the San Juan fort, how the trailingconsonants fizzled out in shoestring rills,as tonight, the hard words, his reflectionbrooding back through the hospital windowas I write on his playbook a poemhe might wake to after surgery, notstuttering forward into convalescence,but back to an island, an arena,a rental house, a dirt road. [End Page 66]
Benjamin Jackson's poems have appeared in New England Review, the Hudson Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal. He currently teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at the Art Institute of California-San Francisco.