Jane Zwart

Basketball

In summer, when the windows stayed open
and it cost an hour to rake the daylight
from the sky, I lay in bed and listened
to boys playing pick-up in the park.

In fact, their patter distracted me
to sleep. Sure, I drifted off wondering
what fucks and fouls were, but mostly
the shirts and skins reffed

and razzed each other in fugues
too soft to parse. Plus their percussion
was gentle: the yo-yo ricochet
of guards dribbling down the pavement,

an abrupt gallop and lay-up, a spangle
traveling the argyle chains when a jump shot
fell. I fell asleep always before the game ended,
but I knew how those boys would quit

scrimmaging, man-on-man, pulling apart
like dance partners, and how they would right
their bikes, and how the luckiest
would ride off cradling the orange world.

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Jane Zwart's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Rattle and TriQuarterly, as well as other journals and magazines.