The Courts at Lawton Street

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• ROBERT PINSKY:

  The poet Alan Shapiro played on his high school and college basketball teams, and now he teaches poetry at basketball powerhouse North Carolina. In fact, legendary coach Dean Smith once invited Shapiro to serve as official timekeeper – a role Shapiro found too pressured.

  Alan Shapiro's poem, "The Courts at Lawton Street," opens with a dreamy evocation:

  Soon when the sun drops over the rim of buildings, across this small tar court the out of work, the working, students and dropouts will be running till dark. But now they are only gatheringin a loose arc before the basket, in a fog of heat where they forget what they forget, lazily shooting.

  A slow impersonal music windsthrough their voices, a great friendliness so casual nobody needsto notice; they talk of this and that, old games, miraculous old moves . . .

  The basketball court is a world of its own that is like the world – for us watching the game on television or for the players on an asphalt court like Shaprio's. His poem closes, as it opened, with it gaze toward the deceptions, risks, hopes and failures of the real world:

  Now there are three balls, three drab moons turning through the gold soot of evening, colliding on the bent rim, makingthe metal chain net whisper applause. At the other end someone dribbles behind his back, between his legs, while two small kids chase him till they stumble,lunging at that ghost between his hands.

  And when singing, "Got to sweeten up my jams" he lopes slowly to the hoop and stuffs the ball in over his head, the kids, knowing they watch a god they could become, with solemnityslap each other's palms and say, "Nasty, nasty," as though the word meant only fame to them, and all there is of hope.