Free Wild Gratitude by Edward Hirsch Page A

us.
Omen
    I lie down on my side in the moist grass
    And drift into a fitful half-sleep, listening
    To the hushed sound of wind in the trees.
    The moon comes out to stare—glassy, one-eyed—
    But then turns away from the ground, smudged.
    It’s October, and the nights are getting cold:
    The sky is tinged with purple, speckled red.
    The clouds gather like an omen above the house
    And I can’t stop thinking about my closest friend
    Suffering from cancer in a small, airless ward
    In a hospital downtown. At 37 he looks
    Boyish and hunted, fingered by illness, scared.
    When I was a boy the summer nights were immense—
    Clear as a country lake, pure, bottomless.
    The stars were like giant kites, casting loose.…
    The fall nights were different—schoolbound, close—
    With too many stormy clouds, too many rules.
    The rain was a hammer banging against the house,
    Beating against my head. Sometimes I’d wake up
    In the middle of a cruel dream, coughing
    And lost, unable to breathe in my sleep.
    My friend says the pain is like a mule
    Kicking him in the chest, again and again,
    Until nothing else but the pain seems real.
    Tonight the wind whispers a secret to the trees,
    Something stark and unsettling, something terrible
    Since the yard begins to tremble, shedding leaves.
    I know that my closest friend is going to die
    And I can feel the dark sky tilting on one wing,
    Shuddering with rain, coming down around me.
Fast Break
    In Memory of Dennis Turner, 1946–1984
    A hook shot kisses the rim and
    hangs there, helplessly, but doesn’t drop,
    and for once our gangly starting center
    boxes out his man and times his jump
    perfectly, gathering the orange leather
    from the air like a cherished possession
    and spinning around to throw a strike
    to the outlet who is already shoveling
    an underhand pass toward the other guard
    scissoring past a flat-footed defender
    who looks stunned and nailed to the floor
    in the wrong direction, trying to catch sight
    of a high, gliding dribble and a man
    letting the play develop in front of him
    in slow motion, almost exactly
    like a coach’s drawing on the blackboard,
    both forwards racing down the court
    the way that forwards should, fanning out
    and filling the lanes in tandem, moving
    together as brothers passing the ball
    between them without a dribble, without
    a single bounce hitting the hardwood
    until the guard finally lunges out
    and commits to the wrong man
    while the power-forward explodes past them
    in a fury, taking the ball into the air
    by himself now and laying it gently
    against the glass for a lay-up,
    but losing his balance in the process,
    inexplicably falling, hitting the floor
    with a wild, headlong motion
    for the game he loved like a country
    and swiveling back to see an orange blur
    floating perfectly through the net.
The Emaciated Horse
    Chinese painting of the Yüan Dynasty
                   It was as if I had stumbled alone
    into another world, someone else’s dream
                             of floating jade mountains, a stone cliff
        dropping to a moonlit blue lake
                                 surrounded by willows, one village
                   winking through the distant clouds,
                             another puckering in the gray mist
    like a paper orchid wrinkling in water.
                   It was as if I had somehow stumbled
    into someone else’s mind: in one painting
                             I knelt beside a small, middle-aged
        woman on a muddy riverbank,
                                 gossiping, wringing out laundry;
                   in another I stood on a steep ridge
                             staring into the forehead of heaven,
    shoulder to shoulder with the lightning.
                   I escaped from the celestial