This ghost-gray backseat is warm; with the top
down, I’m lying in sunlight. Troughs of shadow

slowly fill with that light. The car ride is a biscuit.
And now My Driver is reaching between the seats
to pat the furred crown of my head. A season ago,

I prized snowdrifts in denuded Iowa neighborhoods.
Worshipped the Yet to Come like gift-bites of steak.

These days My Driver sleeps downstairs on a couch
so he can find shoes and shepherd me into the dim.
His dawn-voice is a dish of ice cream all my own.

Lowering myself onto grass to water it yet again
is a sweep of misery I’m used to. This morning,

I couldn’t stand. Forelegs were willing but unable
then not even willing. The stuffed bear is with me.
I smell him, the bear. A blanket I was lifted from.

In the car like this, air is a bruising tenderness.
Regardless, I’m my animal body. I’m what fails

after trying. Now I’m cradled. Placed on a table.
Around me, eyes are stones then stones that weep.
For a little while I was in the grief-long moment—

big-pawed, a tongue papery with thirst, squinting
to see who was keeping me so long in the world

How does one describe a look that resolute?
The left hand on a wall. The shoulder holster
and the black-handled .38 suspended in midair.
Maybe that unseen right hand holds the weapon
we have failed to notice like certain small facts
about furniture in the room the morning we die.
The best of us are equal parts enthralling and sad.
Some are one or two truths rendered more enduring
by a collision between Accident and Good Looks.
But the expression on his face is roughly the same
in any quadrangle of sunlight he’s asked to stand in
in a walk-up loud with San Francisco street traffic
and freighter horns warning small boats in the bay.
And he leans this same swaggering way each take.
Why? Because the King of Cool was a foundling.
An orphan knows the worst about us. And standing
like this, staring off into some unfaltering distance
in a turtleneck and slacks, wearing close-cropped hair,
he suspects he is relinquishing those parts of himself
he is likely never to get back. The best of a generation
model a look like his as one consequence of rebellion
and turning in the sheets at night in cold water flats.
A look that says Tell me how you want me to stand
and Show me that again. And, Go fuck yourself.

1.  Kareem and Magic

I barely knew a Laker from a Cavalier
the winter Mike Nern and Jim Wallace
dragged me to Gund Arena, crisscrossing
eastern Ohio in a December snowstorm.
Cleveland played LA close for three quarters
then the Lakers pulled away like a fast car
if you depress and hold the accelerator.
I’m almost sure that the Cavs never led.

It was Jabbar’s last or next-to-last season.
A bald spot bloomed at the back of his afro.
Magic Johnson fed his skyhook all night.
At the buzzer, applause.  Then it got quiet
and some asshole shouted the word nigger.
Once, loud, like that was the real score.
What did Kareem do?  Grabbed a towel
from a table by a bench and kept walking.

2.  The Year I Shouted Myself Hoarse Every Saturday

I’d bellow Get the ball, Scott! and Take the shot, Scott!
and Play defense! and Hustle! until I pissed him off.
He was 8, his small body fueled on Happy Meals.
He ran the wood-facsimile gym floor at the Y
ecstatically. His grandmother played high school
women’s basketball in Kentucky in the 1950s,
a standout, so he had the bloodlines. But where
does a boy get the heart to devour the world?
I’d be on my feet the whole time, screaming.

It was thrilling in ways I couldn’t bear.
I wanted his team to win. Which they did.
For the rest of us who’d never go undefeated.
For his grandmother who’d have gotten a scholarship,
if they had offered them to women in those days.
And, all right, for a silly father with a bizarre lay-up
and a few poems to carry him. But mostly because
nothing else in this stinking life he was entering
would ever again be so entirely his, and sweet.

In the 20th Century my father loved his government job:
maintaining the well-calibrated heart of the nuclear arsenal.
He said, We can put one of those babies through a window
in the Kremlin after a 6000-mile flight. We made that here.
And, come Memorial Day, at the open house at the air base,
he’d show me his workbench in the cleanroom where dust
held its breath. Later, he might have almost nothing to say.
Maybe: Keep it down. I’m watching fucking 60 Minutes.

How he grew to love Minuteman missiles, the stockpile
whose reliable lethality he’d chosen to take ownership of.
Meaning, he thought about the consequences of the work.
Maybe he had the moral compass of a death camp guard,
but I loved that he sharpened the blade for the American
guillotine. That he visualized ICBMs unzipping the sky.
The hum and verdict of oscilloscopes was in his voice
when he said, You’re thinking about this too much.

“All good writing is swimming under water
  and holding your breath.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the photograph, Zelda wears a fur and hat.
Scott has on a top coat and gloves. It’s winter.
He said Zelda had “an eternally kissable mouth.”
Said that he loved stories of her in Montgomery.
He’d begin: Montgomery had telephones in 1910.
It’s April. A warm day. Magnolias are blooming.
Zelda—ten years old—has rung up the operator

to dispatch the fire department. She climbs out
onto a roof to wait rescue. Lots of white blossoms
are falling on small shoulders. Landing in her hair.
She’s sitting, smoothing her dress when they come.
Whatever else, they looked swell in photographs.
He’d say, Zelda drew flyers from Camp Sheridan
who did figure-eights over her Montgomery home.

They crashed their biplanes trying to impress her.
What he would never say: Then she married me.
As if what happened to her later was his fault
or a series of regrets for which he was to blame.
In 1921, each existed to watch the other move—
This Side of Paradise was a hit, he was soaring.
Zelda wanted to soar herself. Float like a ballerina.

At the end of the day she wanted what she wanted:
a ticket out of Alabama. Excitement. Breathlessness.
After her third breakdown, the years in sanitariums,
visitors whispered, She was a beauty once. Trapped
at last in a burning asylum, the fire real, Zelda Sayre
Fitzgerald died locked in. Screaming to be rescued.
He would’ve been dead, buried, for years by then.

My parents sat me down in front of a circular-screen tv.
Shoved a white Tupperware of buttered popcorn in my lap.
And I saw the actor George Hamilton lip-synching Hank Sr.,
singing onstage at the Ryman Auditorium, the Grand Ole Opry.
My parents had spun his records most nights on an RCA turntable.
So what if the sheet music flying by in black-and-white montage
bore the likeness of Hank and not George Hamilton. So what if Elvis
tested for Hank and was rejected by Miss Audrey. And so what if she,
Hank’s wife, Miss Audrey, a redhead, was played by a platinum blonde.
Hank Williams sang about a light and dark that he carried, of shared pain,
of the burdensomeness of being poor and alive and just trying to hang on.
The gospel of the heartbreak that happens all the time to ordinary people.
So what if Hank slumped over on the road somewhere in West Virginia.
Died without any memorable last words in the back seat of a Cadillac.
He was on his way to a New Year’s Day concert in Canton, Ohio—
we were in Ohio, refugees from the collapse of the price of coal,
he was one of ours, a friend. What’s a little morphine sulfate
with a shot of B-12 (and a booze chaser) between friends?