A playbook riddled 
with x’s and o’s.

   \ 

I made myself,
I was made,
with the clay of his complacence
and the spit of my mother’s rage,
his antagonist
in his image.

   \

Not pitted. Pitched. We were pitched
            against each other. 
I got his arm.

   \

Dead before Dad could know him, his dad wasn’t right. 
He only got to hold his pistol in the mail plane 
by telling the story: he’d take a passenger up, 
and, flipping the plane, hand a pistol back 
like a key and their mouth the lock to put it in. 
All that was required to right the plane
was that they put the barrel in their mouth.
No one ever said why. It wasn’t 
right. Or, as Mom used to say, he was never quite right 
after that…After the accident, the acid, Mississippi, 
Korea, Vietnam, a violence 
accumulated like the junk in his knees: 
white southern libber still jabbing his finger 
when he wants things.

   \

She’d say he was charmed, but more I say
harmed out of harm’s way.

   \

We found the book pitched in the creek, 
            The Book of Sports, a father pitted
against his son, a book of sports forbidden.

Rules ran like vines in the garden of games, 
the games gamboled, diagrams 
crawled across the page, strategies 
for Mother-May-I and Red Rover,
            field sports, court sports, 
billiards, poker—

parlor games he spent college and an MD-
            PhD playing, though—or because—
he had no game per se 

or any interest, much to Mom’s dismay,
of every learning to play
with money.

   \

Concerning Lawfull Sports to be used,

there’s the story where he takes a set 
off a former pro. 
A too-high miles-per-hour serve. 
When he gets called up from the alternate squad, 
only to arrive 
at the opponents’ school hours away by bus 
on a Sunday and realize
he forgot his shoes; 

who, I’ve gathered, used to race 
the other dads at barbeques. 

   \

The key was to let him shoot. 

To let him sink the bucket and take you through.
To let him go big and go big with him every shot 
for the sheer beauty of it,

my twenty-foot ball-toss 
ratcheted up in the spirit of his mythos,
bending me back halfway to Slocum.

Until even the instinct 
to critique broke down. 

His square-cut, salt-and-pepper beard,
his combed bangs flipped back,
his wooden racquet, his strings of catgut.

Balls fluffed up and floating 
through the humid creek bottom.
A loosely enclosed court, a sagging net.

The loose excuse of a score.

   \

From the page on Home Rule:

 “…bluff, swagger, mock, intimidate,
wheedle, gladhand, hawk, consolidate…”

   \

There’s the chapter on the country banker,
his grandfather,
who opened the vault in the midst of financial panic 
and bluffed the town, saying take
what’s yours. Who died, 
a Jim Crow state senator, inside 
a sex worker.  

   \

            and sometimes a man 
smiteth over and thinketh all won:            

            and yet an ungracious post                 standeth in the way
and maketh the ball 

                                    to rebound back again
            over the cord and so loseth the game;

and that will anger a man.

   \ 

The House Where We Played,
   a neighbor’s, a dermatologist, 
cut like a key, like it grew that way
   out of the creek bank— 

   \

I’m thinking of his hundreds
of musty sci-fi paperbacks 
in our attic, the kind of cover
I’d come across with its sleek 
domicile spread
over another planet.

   \

A boy at his microscope
in his grandfather’s field:

tendril or worm, the pale 
writhing?

   \

The sweet, the kudzu-
sweet heat huge,
the street lunged and feinted,
it swooped down with the creek and wheeled away.

In plain sight hidden below we played
without explicit permission
in the middle of the day.

No one would mind nor notice
though my ’90s Prince was loud.
And we were loud, shouting over the net

and the cicadas’ green racket.
A crowd of two, a third estate.

   \

In any rulebook but the book of science
it does not do to be always asking

   \

Our inheritance
no more 
a wilderness
are there any rules 
of why
for how high 
a mayhem 
one may throw
of maybe
the ball or how
a membrane’s 
hard yet 
amphipathic 
tennis is
portals
a game for all that
chutes 
and has rules
and ladders
too