Free Variation on Yehuda Amichai

After one joyous header
after another and chasing
the kids with seaweed
in a game called Sea Snot,
ugh, readers, must we
always be just bad readers
already in the crawl space,
who hot foot sun pain
and think and think
to the wooden slats
through the dunes,
together and apart.
Though the sand cool
powders by sundown,
the sand still deep fries
almost like cooking coals
under ashes, bone ache
still burning, the price
going in and going out.
Then the parking lot
also breaks me up,
all that hullabaloo
with big guts and butts
including my own
of families with crap
to tug and stow,
blacktop radiating
painfully and people
hotfoot there, sharp
asphalt granola shards,
except deceptively thin
teenage lifeguards
who must have thick
callouses, they walk
so naturally, one paw
in front of the other,
who eat dried cat food
and chow down cat pain.
These great Israeli poems
get into things like sand
in the black nylon seats
of a white compact car
again just from the ocean
and the sun and day
ending and being here.
Drive us home, stop
for ice cream, Norway
between the two girls
in the backseat, bored
five minutes in the car.
Their bellybuttons pop
out because the doctors
who delivered them
had to give them
a hard yank at birth,
that concentrated
esprit de corps
sadness of evening
for anybody else
yet in a moment. Oh
God, this day, this day.

First Spring Days on the Basketball Court

for Alan Shapiro

The gracious Dominican high school ball players
show up on the court in their baseball pants
and shirts and start shooting around
and even though most of their shots
are off, they are moving the ball around,
looking for each other, looking to pass,
and even I can distribute the ball now
and fifteen minutes later I am not
having a heart attack or wheezing
but calmly sweating. Here's why:
they are not chumps. Chumps exhaust
everybody. I don't want to hang out
with five dudes like me, lumbering
and lunging choppers who move
constantly at the hoop and though
they stink at it, they are exasperating
and exhausting. My God, man, you
are such a chump and yet to squash
you I have to actually get in your face
over and over again. People who know
how to team up, they are devastating
though not using all of their energy
at once, and consequently, your defeat
or, yeah right, victory is not the horrible
grind of one on one, but a fluid
and efficient machinery of care. The trees
are budding or the sepals are about to open.
It's the same from April to June
on the court, in the green and golden
light of afternoon. The daffodils
start it all out, like the initial displays
of beautiful skin. You don't have
to put your sweater away. You can go
outside in a raggedy torn sweater
over your tee shirt, and wear shorts
held together with safety pins
and splattered with house paint-
house paint? You are such a chump.