I have spent many hundreds of hours shooting [a basketball] on this court, with its view of the Bay and Oakland hills beyond. One day the view was mysteriously obliterated and my eyes burned, as it turned out by ash from the terrible Oakland hills fire.
There is nowhere that I am more at my ease than in this place, shooting. If I have a poem that I’m working on, I will roll it over and over again in my head, like a child rolling a marble between his fingers, feeling the texture and weight of each syllable. You may think me immodest, but I have done some of my best work up here on Corona Heights, that’s what this place is called. You might say this is my office. Call me a wastrel, if you like.
—August Kleinzahler, Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs: Selected Prose 2000-2016 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)
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