Norbert Krapf

Shooting Hoosier Hoops Norbert Krapf

Sometimes I’m on the playground of the grade school playing horse by myself flinging up shots and the touch comes back and the ball spins

oh just right and it’s all net baby, all net again. I swoop in a three even before there is such a thing. Yeah, I want to be just as damn good

as awesome Oscar Robertson and there’s a crowd in my head screaming and yelling me on… Just before the final gun claps loud

my long one soars into the sky and rattles into the hoop and the net rips and wow! The crowd goes wild again and I’m King

of Hoosier Hoops and every soul in town knows who I am. I can pull up in my convertible fairly late at night and park

and walk into the Dairy Queen and be given the best, most over-loaded butterscotch banana split in the universe and girls want to cruise around town with me. Then it’s late and I’m in the barnyard where there’s a hoop and I’m home playing against myself

with just one dim lightbulb. I shoot by feel and after the ball leaves my fingertips I hear repeats of the same sweet late-night swish.

Norbert Krapf, former Indiana Poet Laureate, will have his fifteenth poetry collection, Spirit Sister Dance, and his Homecomings: A Writer's Memoir, published this year. He received the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, received a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Indy Arts Council to combine poetry and the blues, and has a poem in stained-glass at the Indy International Airport. For more, see http://www.krapfpoetry.net/.