Kobe, a man can’t make a planet
or craft a galaxy with his bare hands
but he can jab step on the wing
to juke a dude out of his crouch so hard
he bolts into a second orbit. I’m saying,
a man can make whole worlds
out of a crowd’s stillness, if the stillness
is the preface to awe, if the man hangs
in the air not by garrison or noose
but by his own muscle
and wish.
I once floated thirty-six-
thousand feet into the Brooklyn sky
and looked down on every cloud
above Lefferts Gardens, the Heights,
Bed-Stuy—Lower Merion too!
Truth is I just flew round-trip to the tropics
when I sat same row with a woman
and her six-year-old girl whose father
they lowered into the ground
not ten months earlier. The daughter clutched
one rose in each fist as if these two blooms
were the secret engines propelling
everything that leaves the earth.
What a gift, then, when she serenaded me
with three tunes in three languages
and both our laughter after each one.
We might not know who or what
we’ll meet when we get up high enough
over the ordinary rooms
into extraordinary love, but sometimes
we bear witness to a body in flight
and for a moment know what to do
with half our human sorrow.
I’m only one of millions who have seen you
bang once toward the baseline then rise
before fifty thousand eyes
that stare up into the middle heavens
where your lean frame engraves a space
for a higher (though vanishing) plane,
where reason and mathematics
get all the laws and formulas wrong.
Just look at our faces, Kobe. We are
what singing looks like before the song.
—Patrick Rosal