Kobe Bryant Competes With King David at the Gallerie dell Accedemia
The crowd circles the masterpiece, around and around, wondering how something this beautiful
can be possible, this perfectly shaped human that so astounds us we wish to protect it from the vibrations
of our own footsteps— suddenly, all eyes shift and stare at this other familiar figure
of famous flesh and blood, wearing purple Lakers’ shorts and shaking toursts’ hands,
a modern hero stealing our attention from the one we’ve waited in line to view, all morning and into the afternoon,
the shepherd boy who inquired of the king about that uncircumsized nine foot bronze-helmeted Philistine:
Who does he think he is? he spat out: To defy the ranks of the living God?
So he gathered his stick and smooth stones
and became a stone himself, defending the civil liberties of Florence, his eyes permanently fixed, the way Kobe
measures the angle and distance of the swish, daring Rome. Now—a torn ligament this time—
he’s out for the season, and some commentators are suggesting that, at thirty-seven, maybe he should retire.
I was—weren’t you?—Kobe, scoring all those points on my parents’ backof-the-house b-ball court, shooting
my famous jumpers and foul shots all day at the splintered backboard and netless rusty rim until dusk
blurred into dark and the ball shattered one of the garage windows and my father yelled that was enough for the day. Meanwhile the future king maintains his hurling position, the muscles preserved, we hope,
for as long as marble lasts.
Philip Terman’s most recent collection is Our Portion: New and Selected Poems. Autumn House Press will publish This Crazy Devotion in 2020. A selection of Mr. Terman’s poems, My Dear Friend Kafka was recently translated into Arabic and published in Damascus, Syria. His poems have been widely published in literary magazines and are featured in a mural by Pittsburgh artist James Simon, “The Singing Musicians,” at the Squirrel Hill Food Pantry