Fast Break

Opening the poem with the basketball suspended on the rim, not dropping into the basket or back down to the court, places the reader in a split second of time. We know the ball must fall, but the poem keeps us suspended along with it: in line 2 it “doesn’t drop.” The ball only moves at the exact right time in line 5 to be identified and captured by the center. The rim in the poem functions as a place of transition (literally and figuratively, since the scene depicts a transition during a basketball game). Just as other works of art use doorways and thresholds to herald a shift of some kind, the poem begins in a physically liminal space.

Almost all elegies make note of time, especially the speed of its passing. The basketball metaphor in “Fast Break” serves Hirsch’s elegiac purpose exactly, as the entire narrative spills out briskly in one sentence like a sports announcer’s play-by-play. When all is well in the world of the game, time works with precision. For instance, in line 4, the starting center plays his role exactly and “times his jump / perfectly” (Lines 4-5).