Working the Post with Big Jim McKean

76 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 two-on-two? Nothing, everything. I’m down on the post, giving up seven inches and fifty pounds to Big Jim McKean, who keeps backing me down, putting me on his hip, rotating left, right, the eight-foot hook there every time. Lucky he’s rusty. Who cares if he’s twenty 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 pecked 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. for Jon Pineda, for Kym Ragusa Sebastian Matthews 77 Sebastian Matthews 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 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. Bill Matthews ...