At night, he ordered his own sun, which was
Supposedly arriving soon, they said

And, after the explosion, made spheres sing,
A pure expression of pure poetry,
Like rising rain or a nation with no

You can be a mother who knows a god,
And you can ask him for magic armor,
A shield the width of Saturn’s widest rings,

When equality feels like oppression
To you, the keyboard a sword and cannon
And the comfort of being everyone

Music for when the music is over
Is what a poem is. There’s no music
In a poem, just the imaginary

It’s late. History promises you a kiss
When she comes to bed. So you say good night.
You’re tired and can’t keep your eyes open,

I write my little song. And you call it
Guitar noodle. You write without you here.
And I call it the poem with you here in it.

Not knowing the difference between Heaven
And Paradise, he called them both Heaven.
So when he shrugged at the thought of a god

The wintered trees shine white in the white sun
Daydreaming of West Indian dawn—,
Of palms that line the bright back of a beach,

Perpetual peace. Perpetual light.
From a distance it all seems graffiti.
Gold on gold. Iridescent, torqued phosphors.

You and I, when we sleep, we’re like whales
because fish swim out of my mouth
and you dishevel the seaweed.

The moods of the cantaloupe king are moods

Of the melon king in green variations.

Both entered the orange parlor like nations

After a long night swimming
In the dry dark of a book
I heard outside my window 

Our favorite poet/sports correspondent is back, this time with a meditation on Lionel Messi.

Football is a menace to society.

Our favorite poet/sports correspondent is back, this time with a meditation on Lionel Messi.

The two most in-form players at the 2019 Australian open, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Danielle Collins, met their ends in the semifinals.

Georges Henri Gougoltz’s Hôtel Beau-Site served as the birthplace of the clay court. Today he’s barely a footnote in the history of tennis.

  There are stories. And then there are “story-stories.” The twin reemergence of Roger Federer and Rafael “Rafa” Nadal this year has been one of those story-stories, full of wait-that’s-not-alls and tell-me-what-happened-nexts. Their ret…

After a harrowing defeat at Wimbledon last year, Roger Federer hasn’t merely healed his body and his game. He’s healed his body and changed his game.

The clay-court specialists: I grew up thinking of them like those poets who had that one great mode in them, spring or death or jazz.

The players themselves have never seemed more like performers, generating a kind of aspiration as they play the roles of younger, superior versions of the audience.

Watching tennis like this appeals to that part of you that flutters and pinwheels: the nostalgia of the cynic, the romance buried in the hard-hearted.

Tennis is no longer about youth. Three of the four singles finalists in the Australian Open went pro before the turn of the millennium.

Once upon a time, not too long ago, we knew what the routine was when it came to the end of an NBA season: the playoffs would come, a champion would be crowned, and—in the scoreboard–über alles style embraced more by basketball than any other sp…

The finals get interesting.And just like that, Monday evening blossomed into something both the rabid and the casual basketball fan will remember. The Cavaliers, down three games to one and facing elimination on the road—in the fortress that is the…

I made a decision once the playoffs began to take a little break from this column. I know what you’re thinking: Who writes on basketball for an entire regular season and then takes a break when the playoffs start? Well … I do. It wasn’t a drama…

Dearly beloved, this is what it sounds
Like when you become a symbol through sound
That roreth of the crying and the soun:
You give up all your shit, down to the sou,
Wade through raspberry death to find him so
You can remind yourself he once wasRowa…

Reflections on the end of the regular season.The last two weeks of the NBA regular season, things get turned on their heads. It’s like someone switches off the gravity, or even the gravitas, and concerns that were once at the bottom float up to the…

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” Einstein wrote in The World As I See It. “It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”Thus far, the NBA has been far from that cradle this se…

This past weekend, Toronto became the center of the NBA universe as the NBA All-Star Weekend, with its various constellate events—the celebrity game, the skills competition, the three-point contest, slam-dunk contest, and other haute nouveauté—once…

If you’re among those who believe we’re witnessing a basketball revolution, you should be very interested in the LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. They’re not shooting threes like their lives depend on it, and they’re not using lineup…

Living and dying by the NBA schedule; watching two New York teams face off.
In late summer, after the draft and free agency, as fans begin to foster new dreams or cold, hardening hopelessness about their team’s prospects, the NBA releases its schedu…

How the Knicks learned to trust.Hustle and trust—the meaning of abstractions like these comes from the actions and decisions that form around them, and its these I’ve always preferred to focus on. The context gives meaning to the concept. You h…

Assessing the season at the halfway point; what’s going on with the 76ers?The midpoint of the NBA season comes a little after the turn of the calendar year. As we settle into the new promises we’ve made to ourselves, basketball teams are busy evalu…

We’re away until January 4, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!Watching Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors.When Nina Simone first sings the title of “Feeling Good,” her voice…

Watching Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors.For Jake LelandWhen Nina Simone first sings the title of “Feeling Good,” her voice has been alone for thirty-nine seconds. The solitary singer: there’s always something fiat lux about it. Resol…

Elizabeth Bishop would have some words for the New York Knicks.This past Sunday night, as the particular perfume of Thanksgiving faded from our house, I nibbled on Chinese food while watching the New York Knicks lose to the Houston Rockets. It was a …

Our basketball columnist ventures to Portland.In the beginning, also known as last week, I welcomed you to my ebullient but off-kilter basketball life. We were in Brooklyn, watching a Nets game—an unlikely place to begin, as a Manhattan resident an…

Say hello to our new basketball columnist: Rowan Ricardo Phillips.Last Wednesday evening, after most of the autumn day had been washed away by rain, I found myself crossing Atlantic Avenue, in Brooklyn. A friend and I were heading to Barclays Center …

The trouble with gazing upward in New York.About four minutes into Stevie Wonder’s 1973 classic “Living for the City”—a surging, seven-plus minute thumper track about racial injustice, migration, and the failure of the latter to cure the form…

The World Cup doesn’t end so much as it slips back into itself. As soon as the whistle is blown one last time, the recaps, the nostalgia, and the smart surmises begin. But then, a day later, after the last team has returned to its home country and…

Argentina and the Netherlands played yesterday’s second semifinal. That’s as much as should be said about the match, which forced us to appreciate what this World Cup has been, while remembering what it could have been. Throughout 120 minutes of …

The arc of this World Cup nears its completion. Over prosperity and poverty, over cities and shores and jungles, over fair winter and fiery winter, it ascended, curved, and now looks to settle, in Rio’s Maracanã on Sunday. But first, the midweek …

The United States plays Belgium today in the round of sixteen, with the winner moving on to the quarterfinals of this 2014 World Cup. It’s an accomplishment the U.S. has only managed once before, in 2002, by beating Mexico, before losing a tightl…

My friend Jacob tends to be right about things. He has great taste in music; I find myself nodding my head at him whenever politics comes up; and when he laid out, like tarot cards, his hopes for this World Cup—as nearly all of my friends did befor…

The Netherlands and its flexible formations.France ’98 remains the standard for World Cups in my lifetime. The number of great players in their prime, the quality of the games in the knockout rounds, the last-second drama of the now (thankfully) ab…

The fall of Spain; how Croatia got its groove back; four degrees of surprise from Australia.The same day that, in Chile, more than twenty previously unknown works by Pablo Neruda were discovered in the most unlikely of places—a drawer—Spain thoug…

Germany vs. Portugal; Iran vs. Nigeria; USA vs. Ghana.The greatest poverty is not to live
in a physical world, to feel that one’s desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair.
—Wallace Stevens Yesterday, in a tunnel down under the Manhattan Bridg…

Vahap Avşar’s “Black Album,” currently on view at Istanbul’s lovely Rampa Gallery, is a marvelous show. Its quiet, metaphorical registers are a departure from Avşar’s previous style, which found its strength in more overtly political st…

The great Catalan writer Salvador Espriu—and he was a very, very great writer—was born one hundred years ago today, in Santa Coloma de Farners, a town some one hundred kilometers northeast of Barcelona. He moved as a child further south to seasid…

The most common score in basketball is 2-0. It tends to be the point of departure from which thousands upon thousands upon thousands of basketball games subsequently differentiate themselves. Yes, of course the game can break its goose eggs with a …