Loony Bin Basketball

The gym opened out

before us like a vast arena, the bleached floorboards

yawned toward a vanishing point, staggered seats high

as the Mayan temple I once saw devoured by vines.

Each of us was eaten up inside — all citizens of   lost

             and unmapped cities.

Frank hugged the pimply ball

over his belly like an unborn child. Claire

dressed for daycare in daffodil yellow and jelly shoes.

David’s gaze was an emperor’s surveying a desiccated

battlefield. Since he viewed everything that way, we all

            saw him the same.

The psych techs in Cloroxed white

were giant angels who set us running drills, at which

we sucked. The zones we set out to defend were watery

at every edge. We missed close chest passes, easy combos.

Our metronomes run different tempos,

            John proclaimed.

Then Claire started seeing

dashes stutter through the air behind the ball.

Then speed lines on our backs, and then her own head

went wobbly as a spinning egg. She’d once tracked

planetary orbits for NASA and now sat sidelined

            by her eyes’ projections.

Only Bill had game.

Catatonic Bill whose normal talent was to schlub

days in a tub chair — his pudding face scarred

with chicken pox — using his hand for an ashtray,

belly for an armrest. Now all that peeled away, and he

            emerged, clean as an egg.

He was a lithe

and licorice boy, eeling past all comers, each shot

sheer net. He faked both ways, went left. Beneath the orange

rim his midair pirouettes defied the gravity that I

could barely sludge through. He scored beyond what even

             Claire could count,

then he bent panting,

hands on knees as the orderlies held out water cups,

and the rest of us reached to pat his back or slap

his sweaty hand, no one minding about the stench or his

breath like old pennies. Then as quick as that

             he went.

Inside his head

some inner winch did reel him back from the front

of   his face bones where he’d been ablaze. He went back and

back into that shadowed stare. Lucky we were to breathe

his air. Breath is God’s intent to keep us living. He was

             the self   I’d come in

wanting to kill, and I left him there.