His Own Space

Dangling his legs outside the plane in wind
that seems about to whip him in half at the hips,
but won’t, having split

from his wife, he free-falls
into the sky one solo Saturday,
in danger he can out-

maneuver without explaining the urgent
intricacies of extrication,
the speed

of release, the silence coming down
alone, for the first time, above
a drop-zone far

from the two-flat fixer-upper he fixed
last summer, the scorching
square of concrete he poured

for a son almost his Dad’s size now as he leaps
down there in city heat, pounds the ball
and swivels and leaps

until the backboard’s battered with his shots
like questions whose answers better be exact.