By Chanda Feldman
After David Hammons
A shine to the bark, silver leaves aflicker
and the wound that made the basketball hoop:
a bicycle’s metal wheel gouged in the tree,
the trunk’s burred lip that clamps it.
Whose childhood monument is this?
In the foreground of whose childhood home,
its blind-drawn windows? Where is the adolescent
of the grass and weeds, after school? The adolescent
of the fluid leap and jump shot? Of the glissando
stride and lay-up? The plosive woop woop cries sent up
when the body satisfies the calculating eye?
O the tree ashimmer in hypotheticals’ blooms—
where’s the undissuaded youth who sought
a scarce grace here? Who sought to make bank?
The shoulder and arm and wrist on repeat
even as day went thoroughly dark
who refused to come inside until they exhausted
the audience of their mind? O extraordinary dunk,
O hard slam, shudder the immovable tree.
Where is the glimmer of a sign
one might one day rise among the ordinals
to be ranked first, first, first? Wouldn’t
it be possible? Because if not, if not, if not.
Source: Poetry (September 2019)
Poet Bio
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