On watching NBA Basketball with Jack McCarthy

(while waiting for a poetry slam to begin)

I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday. - Raymond Chandler 

We start with two minutes left in the game,

and a win separated by a basket,

this makes it easy for the uninitiated to get involved.
I am the uninitiated.

 

It is an easy beginning.

I keep my mouth shut and Jack admits, “Baseball is really my game.

I love baseball. But I have to watch this game because they beat my Boston.”

I am hoping this will not lead to a conversation on baseball,

it doesn’t.
 
“My Boston,” he says while pointing at one of the teams on the screen
and he has this twinkle in his eye, which he might always have

but I don’t know because I have never stood this close to Jack before.

I am the uninitiated.
 
 “My Boston,” he says. And I picture him holding a whole team like a cradle,
holding the whole city like a map saying, “you have a place inside me.”

A place beside the dampness that has settled into the bones of a

displaced New Englander every time time it rains in Seattle

making a watering can of his heart.

 

The players on the screen shift into the shape of a bucket,

and it looks bigger than it is, big like the swell of the big dipper full from the generosity of the stars.

And for just this instance, I think I understand the grandiose.

 

With a basket to win the game, prefaced by an eloquent swan dive
through the air, a defiance of gravity, I hear Jack’s “ohhh” replace
the swoosh of the ball falling through a net.
 
And there in his throat is a sparrow, captured like gentleness

wrapped in a blanket and rocked to sleep in the hush

of the breath from a pair of lungs.

I am certain the air around us changes,

There is a closeness here.

Close like the space between lungs and heart.

Close like the movement between the up and down beats of a sparrow’s wings.

Close like a poem and a prayer.
 
Close like this basketball game.

 

And yet, in Jack's “ohhh” no one is meant to win,

it is just one moment of mercy.
 
And then, it is just two poets standing watching a basketball game:
one holding a city in his heart while a sparrow flutters its wings through his breath,

one holding a moment of grace looking for a poem in which to place it.