(after Wallace Stevens' '13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird')

I.
The basketball bounces,
frees from the hands,
dribbles itself down to drops, stops.

II.
The basketball sails through hoop after hoop,
not from me, but in my hoop dreams.

III.
The basketball in the sky is ourselves,
planet earth.

IV.
The basketball is dropped from Sears Tower,
zooms through an open sewer cover
on Wacker Drive, and wedges between the
jaws of a subterranean alligator.

V.
The field is empty, a basketball
rolls down a hill to my feet,
its owner waves from the top of the hill.

VI.
The Christmas basketball is forgotten
in the closet, gathering dust
until May.

VII.
My neighborhood park’s fieldhouse has a locked room,
filled with softballs, bats, soccer balls,
and basketballs. The room smells of
dirt and defeat, of victory and laughter.

VIII.
A basketball in summer is seldom by itself.
A person is never far behind.

IX.
Is there anything quite the color of a basketball?

X.
A snake crawls the side of a basketball.
The only way to go is not up,
but in circles.

XI.
A truck rolls over a basketball.
It becomes a pancake of the past, a frisbee with no future.

XII.
When boredom slows the day, dribbling a basketball
and kicking your legs over it always speeds the hours
and records them forever in your muscles,
which, by the way, have minds of their own.

XIII.
I did a thousand lay-up shots in college basketball.
Now all I can show for it is dunking change
in tollway bins on the I-94
without stopping the car.

Cynthia Gallaher

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/13-ways-of-looking-at-a-basketball/