Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.

When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.

I make myself up from everything I am, or could be. For many years I was more desire than fact. When I stop becoming, that’s when I worry.

And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

I've tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.

I will try to disappoint you better than anyone ever has.

Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.