m.

I sought a place where the ocean waves break
where over beaten boulders and bluffs
at the far edge of the mouth of Patong Bay
there stands under palm trees a hut roofed in thatch
a table or two and some plastic chairs
and for thirty-two baht the beer is cold
and there in a seat damp with sand
I idled with a drink and studied the beach
the people from other lands
flocks of gulls and off the shore
speedboats bouncing crest to crest
and I felt the crash of the surf in the soles of my feet
and for just a moment you were there beside me
Isn’t this nice you said
It’s like our own secret garden
but you were not there and I drained my beer and stood
and you were not there and I brushed the sediment 
from my shorts and many times since 
I’ve sat in my mind at that table
that ramshackle bar on the rocks we never saw together
where you walk now softly through my dreams

Mike Mike's & Mike

I remember Mike’s in Carson City:
warehouse gym with a roll-up door where
Simon took me twice a week.

Walking in you noticed the ring first, spattered proscenium 
of rope and canvas and wood, there against the rear wall;
the ring, and likely a couple of kids sparring,
hurting each other like they were getting paid for it;
you heard the strident rapidfire rattle of bouncing speedbags,
the hailstorm nick of skipping ropes; the gasps and hisses
susurrating from the disciples shadowboxing in front 
of the spit-flecked mirrors and the heavy leathern thud 
of men at work on the big bags.

There were never any women at Mike’s.
The air was hot.
There was always music
and it was always rap.

Then the round timer cried, piercingly,
not the peal of a bell but a shrill keening chime
and all at once
as if enchanted
all fell still,
and in that stillness the music came suddenly clear;
you heard breathing
and the soft patter of pouring sweat.

It was at Mike’s I had my ass truly kicked
for the first time.

He was a kid my size
and his name was also Mike
and within twenty seconds of the opening of our spar
he speared a right fist
right into my face
and I felt my nose firework with
a cartilaginous crack.

So many sizzling lights—
then I was in a dream, 
a haze, 
I was underwater— 
I was fifteen
and had never been hit by someone strong
who actually wanted to hurt me.

I lasted one more round
before Simon climbed into the ring
and called an end to it.

I can still see Mike so clearly.
The bleached tips
of his tight, curly black hair. His eyes.
The vermiculate wink of the gym lights 
in the wrinkles of his red glove
zooming toward me…

The ride home in Simon’s car was quiet.

When I told my mom what had happened
she said only that I needed to hold on to this feeling,
to cling to it and cherish it
so that
I would never let it happen again.

That was the night I learned what fighting is.

And the next day
when I stepped again
through those frayed red ropes
I became a fighter—
and Mike, if you’re out there,
I doubt very much you remember me
but I just wanted to say:

1

If not for the king’s say the guards would just have thrown me
like any mad criminal down the chute of that foul enclosure
and who knows what might’ve happened then—
the drop is steep, understand, and I am old, with an old man’s
brittleness.
Instead I was lowered by a braid of rope, bumping and scraping
my way along a stained slope of dusty brick, scarred
here and there by the lashing hooves
of ruminants long since consumed. So I had plenty of time
to think about what awaited me in the pit below.
The king considered his rope a mercy, and probably he was right—
a cat is a cat is a cat, and no fund of faith or conviction
can balk the instinct of a starving lion
when a bird with a broken wing plunges suddenly in front of it—
but I tell you it didn’t feel like that, mercy,
as foot by foot I sank
down
and down
into the murky miasma of a savage stink. How it stank!
The air was a mingled mire of torrid
uprising
weltering odors of dung and putrescence,
carrion and corruption—and worse
that dry, tall-grass, somehow tawny smell of lion. It was dry, yes,
the smell was hot, the smell was ancient, reaching like dragon’s breath
all around me—I tell you
I had no thoughts of the king’s mercy then,
as that death stench clotted in my nostrils
and fear poured out of me like dark water
(though surely as I say had I simply been tossed
as so many others before me, gone
into the hole screaming for their lives,
I would not be here now to relate the tale).
I was lowered. How long
was that rank brick throat? Twenty feet? Thirty?
I was lowered
and it felt interminable;
I went down
and when the soles of my feet touched the floor
I experienced such a rush of terror I forgot
my own name. If not for the king’s rope (mercy!)
I would have collapsed.
I was praying but was so afraid
no words comprised my prayer;
I wasn’t conscious of the act, wasn’t speaking
in any language I had ever heard or uttered
in all my eighty years.
Unconsciously I prayed, and vaguely the king’s voice
came down to me, and with numb fingers
I unknotted the rope.
I didn’t watch as it was hauled back up
into the sunshine of Babylon.
I was in a broad pen of mud bricks. Tall sheer walls.
The only light came from the aperture above.
Bones lay in scattered profusion about my feet.
That same atavistic prayer, beyond language,
continued murmuring from my spitless lips
and my stricken eyes peered round the gloom.
The king called something else I didn’t catch—
	Your God will save you, he confessed later over drinks—
and then I heard the grating of the stone seal
sliding into place overhead
and in the instant before the light went dark
saw the lions studying me, poised in gray-gold attitudes 
of felid curiosity,
standing along the walls with their round ears pricked.

2

I didn’t move.
When I could see again (or nearly)
I was in a spell of fetid darkness
and surrounding me in that false night were a number
of winking greenish glimmers: big cats’ eyes drawn close
without a sound.
Then I could hear them breathing.
I smelled their warmth,
felt myself enhaloed by an aura
of rank and matted fur,
claws
and yellow teeth.
I could feel their size.
I didn’t move.
No thoughts for the king now, nor his law,
nor the jealousy of his scheming advisors.
There was only God
and the selfsame lions,
the presence of the lions there in the dark, with me,
God,
watching with their silent spectral eyes.
I heard the mutter of a syncopated, whispery pleading,
repeating over and over “Omygodplease, please,
Omygodplease…” which I recognized with a shock
as my own frail voice.
I sat hard in the flagstones paving the floor.
The reality of the tiles—that some craftsman 
had meticulously laid the base of this chthonian place
with bricks—
struck me with the quality of dream, and for the first
and only time of my ordeal
I thought I must be dreaming: any moment now
I would waken in my own humble quarters in the city,
cross to my window that faced the daybreak over distant Jerusalem
(it was my daily devotions there that landed me in this unholy predicament)
and give thanks to my Lord for my lionless existence.
I looked at those wan and avid eyes
staring back.
No dream.
And whether my predicament was unholy
or ultimately sanctimonious
I was in it, come what may.
I prayed. I kept myself very still
and the glint of the eyes swirled and prowled
like some minute yet heathen constellation
gyring with me at its nexus.
The eyes came and went
and
the killing fangs never sprang.
I prayed,
and as I did I felt my mind reel and fracture,
even now I can’t explain it,
I felt myself ascending 
through such bleak heights of fear
that, breaking through (or out), I arrived
at a sphere of being wherein I no longer cared
what happened to me, or rather
that whatever I bore 
was right
and when I came back to myself
I could not wholly recall that strange plane
where I had been: all I knew
was that the chamber was bright with daylight
and the lions, drowsing in the floor,
were lifting blinking sleep-squinted eyes toward the ceiling
and I understood that, impossibly,
I had been asleep.

More impossible still: I was alive.

3

A familiar voice shouted down the sunny shaft above:
“Daniel! Daniel answer me old man! Are you safe?”
I yelled back in the affirmative, along with a slew
of vivid invective upon King Darius’s name—
such as no one else in the empire could have gotten away with,
I can tell you that.
A rope slapped down into the pen
and then a raw wet haunch of lamb.
The cats were on the meat in a flash
and I looped the rope about my waist
and was lifted into the sky.

***

I took a single breath of the morning air of Babylon
and began to weep.
Waiting for me next to the enclosure's entrance
stood the king and his retinue of guards
and they had with them a group of other city officials,
bound up in gleaming shackles wrist to wrist
with their womenfolk. I tell you
it was the grimmest-looking bunch 
I ever did see.
I later learned these captives
were the very conspirators whose report
had preempted my arrest,
and they were to be executed in the same manner
as they tried to have done unto me.

“Mayhap your God will protect them too,”
Darius said, motioning to the guards.

I walked away as the shrieking started.
The gnawed skulls of those unfortunates
yet leer from the tiles in the lions’ den
and I am a free man again—
but
(and no one knows this part)
I’ve been dreaming about lions ever since
and
I suspect I always will.

Lily Green Blues

I knew a girl named Lily Green,
she was an Alpha Phi at Chico State…
Said there was a girl at Chico
named Lily Green.

Lily Green was a friend of mine
and when she died she was just nineteen.
Oh I knew a girl named Lily Green.
Lily Green died she was only nineteen.

Lily Green popped a pill,
she thought it would help her sleep.
Said Lily popped a pill
and drank it down with wine
and then she closed her eyes
and went away in her sleep.

I knew a boy his name was J.C.
Me and J.C. we had some good times
and J.C. was in bed with Lily
the night the girl died.
They each took a pill 
and laid down side by side.

And when he woke in the morning
J.C. found Lily Green dead.
Saw her pale in the daylight
with the sun in her eyes
and her lips stiff and blue
and when he touched her he knew
the girl wasn’t sleeping.
Said when he touched her he knew
the girl wasn’t sleeping.

J.C. was nineteen,
last to see Lily alive,
and as he told me what happened
he started to cry.
Broke down on my doorstep
and started to cry:
“I killed her! I killed Lily Green!”
Me and J.C. we had some good times.
J.C. was just nineteen.

I knew a girl named Lily Green.
Lily Green died she was only nineteen.
Oh I knew a girl named Lily Green,
Lily Green died she was only nineteen.

 I Used to Tell This Story at Parties

That night in Hollywood with Cianci,
the girls from Tahoe and the endless wine—
it was all a game and we were winning,
standing on a corner of Hollywood and Wilcox
at three o’clock in the morning
Cianci and me—
shouting at traffic because we were bored,
because at some point the girls 
had gone back to their hotel
without us.

Some nights decide for themselves
when to call it quits.

We were still in the thick of it, half-cocked
with a deck of smokes between us
when a purple PT Cruiser pulled up to the curb
and the driver’s side window
rolled down.

“Hey guys. Where’s the party?”

Inside were two young women 
with long brown hair,
one big and the other slim,
each in a rakish gray fedora
like sisters in a fairy tale, looking
at us there on that street corner
with selfsame expressions
I thought I understood.

So did Cianci.

“We’re the party,” he said.
“Get in,” the driver said.

So we pitched our butts and seconds later
were in the back of their car
being driven away down Hollywood Boulevard,
grinning at our fortune.

It happened just like that
and just as quickly
the mood in the car turned 
sour.

Cianci could be vindictive
especially when drunk
and things were said
our chauffeurs didn’t care for;
but I thought it was all good fun
and I was smiling as
they steered that purple PT Cruiser
like a boat across the buckled pavement
of an abandoned gas station
somewhere in the vast night of Los Angeles
and parked beneath a sputtering streetlamp—
I was smiling
as the girl in the passenger seat,
the big one,
turned round
and held up a can of bear mace
in front of my eyes.

“Shut the fuck up. Just be quiet. 
Give us whatever cash you have
and get the fuck out of our car
or I’ll burn your eyes out.”

So I shouldered my door open,
tumbled into the dim buzzing air
and took off at a run
as Cianci yelled behind me:
                                                  “EAT DICK!”

Then we were running together,
Cianci and me,
no idea where but
we were laughing, shoulder to shoulder
down a nameless L.A. street 
and laughing
beneath a sky that held 
no stars.

The shriek that came from the spinning wheels
of that purple PT Cruiser
as it whipped round and charged after us
was just like the sound you hear in movies.
I glanced back to see headlights
zooming toward me
and then I wasn’t laughing
and I saw panic in Cianci’s eyes. I could feel
the force of the speeding car
right behind us, could hear the engine gaining
like a pack of wild dogs
hot at our heels.

We ran and the night spun
and none of it mattered, meant anything,
because those girls weren’t criminals—
anyway we didn’t have any money—
but still we ran and still they chased
and it seemed the only thing to do
was to just keep 
going.

Eventually the girls got out
and continued the pursuit on foot.
Cianci and I hid
beneath the exterior stairwell
of a small apartment building
and watched from the shadows as
our would-be bandits went loping by:
one big, the other slim,
in matching gray fedoras,
on and gone into night and memory
like a sigh of relief.

“Think they left the keys in their car?” Cianci asked.
I shook my head. “Do you know where we are?”
“Nope.”
“Shit.”
“Fuck it,” Cianci said. “Let’s see
if we can hitch a ride somewhere…
Got a smoke?”

I filched into my pocket.
Some nights decide for themselves
when they end
and ours wasn’t over yet.

That I’ve Known Hunger

That I’ve known hunger
seems to matter less and less,
becomes more immaterial
as years go by.

That I’ve known hunger,
hungered, and now
carry fat—
as if it’s something I earned
those nights of numberless seconds
of pain,
those days I watched the sated
go striding by, never doubting 
the arrival 
of 
their next meal.

That I’ve known hunger
and the fear of going to sleep hungry,
knowing only
I’d wake in the morning hungry,
with no means certain
to make it go away;
that I’ve starved 
and known the starving
and seen with my own eyes the truth
that the stars do not care
whether you’re a glutton
or die famished;
that I’ve carried the bones of the dead
and gone on
and now order pizza on a whim
and I hold my life both meaningless and precious.

That I’ve known hunger
and tasted the jets of intoxication
of a single bite of bread; that now
I eat without needing
when I can remember needing 
and not being able to eat,
lying awake with the noise of a white refrigerator
chilling empty air, air, no more,
whining, grumbling, groaning
as all cheap apartment refrigerators do, as if
it actually served some kind of purpose—
as if it was anything greater than a hollow cabinet
echoing the moan of my own writhing guts.

That I’ve known hunger
and seen people die in the agonies of it
and now carry fat
and still
throw good food away
should bring me shame, I suppose,
and does—
but the pang of it
seems to dim
with every passing sunrise: the pang 
of the sin of waste
and the pride of suffering equally 
superfluous:
iotas of vanity in the crash of a quenchless tide
                                                                                    winking
in a vastness that neither hears nor sees.

Compositions in Sound and Water

Mike
Tidewater, bright veins rushing over pebbles, shores of sand—
The way he raced over courts of grass or clay or polished wood—
The flow effervescent as his body that glimmered youth: swift, lithe,
And so very frail; but to see him burn across the floor of some arena
Was like watching water pour and seethe, finding its right paths
Effortlessly; and his laugh is gone now, a boy forever fourteen pulled into the sea
By a surge in the tides and drowned in front of us, in the ocean’s glare,
As his father clung to a cliff-face high above and screamed.

Chase
Spume off the shattering ebb, gusting in the wind from the ocean’s face,
He wept before the purity of the coffin of our drowned compatriot,
And like spume he became a dancer: all who knew him will remember
How once in the dark he possessed a stage and danced, his body sparking
Talent, but so frail; and as the drifting spume is possessed by the wind darkness
Blew in and took him, staggered him out the batwings of a bar in San Diego
Into the asphalt night and dropped him there, against black pavement, where
As blood haloed from his broken crown pity turned to screams.

Lauren
Screams, as the wild wind wails from the galloping waves, I remember
Long before that night we were all at senior prom together, Chase’s skull intact,
And her dress a flow of glittering gold like a sunset strait oh how it moved
Upon her frail body and I wore a tie to match and that was the only time
We ever danced, surging together through the dark and it was in the dark
After so many years I was woken by the shrieks of our old friend Cianci telling me
How she’d died and I sat on the lip of my bed with my face in my hands
As I felt her recede from me forever like the tide across my feet.

Reveille

Where I sit at my desk sometimes
I hear the train as it passes through town:
splitting the air with the bay of its horn:

that cry to me that will always speak of leaving;
and I picture the train and its fiery lamp,
great steel shuttle gnashing
implacable as a god;
and remember the trains how they ran through Ventura 
so far away and once
so full of dreams
in a bar car of the Pacific Surfliner
I glanced up from my notebook and saw
out the window a herd of little deer prancing
in a meadow above the sea
and remember 
once
in a train trundling east out of Bangkok
in a time of unrest
in a third class car
inundated with refugees
I put my face out my window
into a verdant rush of jungle air
and watched a rain of garbage pouring
from portholes all down the compartment’s flank
and I was fleeing too
alone in the vastness of Asia
and the horn sounded
like an elephant trumpeting
like the elephants did that morning
in a camp north of Chiang Mai as
yards away I slept on a bed of bamboo
and I sat up fast in the early light
heart booming
because I’d never before been woken
by a gathering of elephants saluting the dawn:
shaking the sky with the force of their herald—
not the end of a world
but the beginning.

Dinosaur in a Bathtub
Reptile Zoo, Bangkok
Crocodylus porosus

Brackish dragon, watching in the daylight:
the conjoined horizons of your vast length—
above: mottled, serrated plates of verdigris teeth;
below: creamy yellow, tessellated glass—

hug the distant wall of your mildewed enclosure
end to end like an incipient shore:
poised over the still and shallow pool
of rancid water you’re allotted.

In the nights slashed through your pyrite eyes
Cretaceous calculations scroll. In the shape of your roar
the silhouette of a hundred million primordial dawns.

Dragon, seacave bane of riverbanks and crossings, what chance
enchantment can this be, that’s imprisoned such force
and made a cramped display of ancient fear?

Alive in the Age of Terence Crawford

I’d rather create accessible truth, inornate
as a wall or tower of masoned stones,
than any bauble of pretty wordplay.

As a child in a boxing ring I learned
power begins in sound feet, and footwork
must foremost dictate range before
it becomes a dance. What does it matter
if your jab dazzles
but doesn’t 
sting?

Communion is the name of the game.

Of course now and again genius emerges 
whose force and style shatter the ephemera,
against whose shining all those clever baubles
are only toys, and the stone walls of pragmatism
appear in their blunt endurance
drab and simple things.

Of course in a fist fight after a point
the efficacy of one’s art transcends argument
regardless of taste or aesthetic.

And when you see it it’s so beautiful it feels necessary:
the rightness of the right glove rising, the validated way
made objective through crucible, the braid
of function and flourish resonating splendidly
as true and brilliant as our sun. 

No, thank you, I’ll not take a drink—
but I’ll spin you a tale if you stand me a meal—
something simple and warm, I think, for the wind
off the sea carries teeth this night, so it does.

Rice perhaps or barley, and a bowl of plain broth’ll
do me just fine. Now as I was saying news
of your fisherman yonder, abed and dying
from his wounds—hit from below, you said? swimming?—
puts me in a mind of a story, and no kwaidan this,
so gather round.

You in this tavern have heard tell of my travels—
						Yes sir, I thank you, the Yoshiokas
						put up one hell of a fight, so they did…
                                                Now quiet down—
and while I cannot speak to the truth of every rumor
I can say that as that breathing ocean whence
the lifeblood of your village derives
nurses beings whose shape and savagery
beggar imagination, so too
in this country stalk wonders most fearsome,
I’ve seen them,
the like of which one day mayhap no longer
will be free to roam our diminishing world.

In the forest of Esshu I encountered a yokai
the priests who study such creatures name rightly
a mountain shark. It was the time of Genna,
in the harvest months, and then as now
dark was gaining. I had no money—
						I thank you again, barkeep,
						for this fare—
so I was hunting a spot in the woods to pass the night
when through the trees ahead I heard a commotion
and gazing saw a flicker of torches moving
and went to investigate.

What I found was a posse of farmers—seven, eight of them—
banded together to slay a monster. The beast
had been preying on their people
and they were armed with an assortment of pitchforks
and spears,
splintering hoes and old kunai trowels.
I addressed myself to their leader:

					I am Miyamoto Musashi,
					a warrior of the Harima province.
					I will lend my sword to your cause
					if you’ll have me.

The wolves of war howled in my blood, you see.
I was eager for challenge.

The leader, a wiry fellow named Koru,
peered at me through the uncertain light.

					Not the same Musashi whose legend
					we hear spoken in the city? Who defeated
					the Yoshioka Clan in single combat?

Poor brave fool. As with you gathered here
Koru was romanced by word of my deeds. 
(Not complaining, barkeep. Just making an observation.)
He didn’t understand it was only by grace of sheer fortune
I stood alive before him now; 
that any of my prior opponents might’ve got the better of me
had circumstances or the day been
just a little different. He didn’t understand it wasn’t righteousness
that drove my blade.

Poor brave fool. He beckoned with his spear,
so I fell into their ranks 
and we walked on.

No one spoke. Darkness fell. It wasn’t long before
we crossed sign of the monster’s passage: scat
and torn shrubbery and the raw gleam of claw marks in the bark
of the pines. There were bones too,
macerated bones, all sorts of bones, glinting like broken crockery
in the duff of the forest floor.
When Koru looked at me his thin face
was grim.

The thing had made its den in a cave of tumbled boulders
in a clearing on the mountainside.
A sharp charnel reek came over us as we approached;
it recalled the stink of the battlefield that filled my nostrils
when I woke in the mud of the plain of Sekigahara,
surrounded by the corpses of my former comrades,
gawping at the sky with rain in their eyes.
My heart sped, and I heard a moan and whimper
ripple down the line of our motley cadre.
Only Koru, poor soul, remained undaunted—
though I could see despite the density of that night
the sudden paleness of his pallor.

We stood at the edge of the clearing,
waiting by the glow of the rushes.
Within the cave all was blackness.
But I could sense the gaze of something there, yes,
watching us out of the dark; could feel
the bloodlust beating, emanant
as the creature’s sour stench.
Great prints mottled the soil. At the mouth
of the cave sat a human skull, cracked,
bearing yet a few strands of rotten scalp.
						This is the place, I said
						and Koru, brave man,
						agreed.

Barkeep, I wonder that I might trouble you
for a cup of tea? My throat grows parched; I’m unaccustomed
to so much talking. A little refreshment to see us through, eh? 
Thank you, I thank you. Now. We’d come to the lair of the beast
and knew it, but before Koru could elucidate our strategy
there was a stir in the air that breathed from the cave
and the thing sprang, bounding out of the dark,
and charged
straight toward the heart of our squad.

There was time enough to apprehend a blur
of enormous movement streaking on all fours
and I dove from its path. Someone shrieked.
When I looked up I saw by the tattering fires
as the screaming men thrashed
Koru dead in the jaws of the monster.
It was larger than the largest ox, mailed
in jagged overlapping scales blue as midnight.
Its mindless eyes burned like the eyes of a cat or nekomata
in the torchlight.

Koru’s spear lay on the ground beside me.
I seized it.

The men were lost in their panic
but I didn’t give a damn about them—
the pall of combat was upon me. There was no world
other than the space of earth 
that held me and my foe. No time. No stars.
I leveled my weapon
and the creature dropped poor Koru’s body
and swung to face me with its long broad snout,
its stained and tanto grin festooned
with gobbets of the farmer’s flesh. I saw
without consciously seeing
the splay of its raptor’s talons in the dirt
and the billowing
of its tessellated chest.
The perversion of its hot breath
was strong and clear.

Its eyes fixed on mine.

Then this was just another duel, another field, another fight
to be won or killed by in the attempt,
and it was out of my hands, beyond my will.
Another fight, and when the creature attacked
I did what I was born to do, my hands,
my terrible hands
reacted with their lethal knowledge
and it was as if I stood outside of myself, looking on
through the eyes of someone else—
eyes that knew the range at a glance, that reckoned
the monster’s trajectory in an instant—
and when its jaws snapped shut they bit only air,
and I poised along the creature’s broadside
and smote the point of Koru’s spear through its heart.

                                        Ah. Matcha is such a pleasant indulgence
on nights like these, when the aki wind blows, so I do say. No need for ceremony
when that dark sea barks, and a man lies fish-bit and dying
just a house away.
					So that’s the story of the time I met a mountain shark.
                                        As with you and your comrade, I carried Koru’s corpse 
home to his village myself. His wife and two daughters
gave me what little food they could
and let me a bed
and in the morning I moved on and, more or less,
forgot about the incident.
But the tale got around as these things do
and last I heard reached the ears of an ukiyo-e painter
in Edo, who commemorated the event
in a woodblock painting.
I imagine you can see it to this day, though truth be told
I’d rather the artist chose Koru for his subject,
because I never killed to see my face in print
and as I say that poor farmer
died brave.

One Good Poem

It was a bright spring day in Chico—
the day before Saint Patrick’s—
when they pulled the plug on Sierra Fox.

Drunk, she’d rolled her car on the 99 and
I arrived at the hospital in time
to see her dead in the ICU,
and when I left again that dim little room
was indelibly impressed on me
and would manifest
in one form
or
another
in most everything I wrote 
after.

For eleven years I thought about Sierra,
that room,
that light—
eleven years typing
before, finally,
something I made of that moment resonated
and an editor decided to
publish.

Your poem amazes me, he wrote on the acceptance.

Of course there was no payment.

And I think now maybe if I survive somehow
until I’m 310 years old—
maybe then, if I’m lucky, I’ll have written
enough good poems
to fill a book…

Wouldn’t that be something?

Novitiates

Wild afternoons in the mountains
before iPhones
spoiling for a fight.

In high school after gym
when the teachers weren’t looking
we’d have boxing matches in the trophy room—
and these contests which were supposed to be
friendly
never quite were.
Once it was me and Morgan Brown.
Morgan was a fighter,
ill-tempered and notorious,
and I popped him in the face
with a fluttering jab
and he rushed me with a flurry,
lefts and rights whirling,
thumping,
then he went for the knockout
	but I saw it coming
and ducked
	and Morgan 
put so much into that final blow
that, missing,
he actually fell to the floor.

Wild afternoons in the mountains
before iPhones
fighting in meadows,
in groves of pines,
Darius and Tufon, Jonathan and Robby, straining
in a plain of fine blue grama grass, bleeding
over fields of beveled snow.
We were all of us martial artists,
all of us crazed,
and we pushed each other
like brothers;
we pushed each other,
laughing through our crimson teeth
as we fought day by day across
what strange wildernesses of fury
toward an idea
of 
transcendence.

Weekdays after school
I traveled county to county
training at different gyms.
We called it sparring,
but it always felt like a fight,
climbing between those ropes
or onto the mats
with a stranger who 
looked at you like 
you were food.

We fought in basketball courts, in cul-de-sacs,
in little rooms with hard rubber floors.
				                                     Once
Robby and I went to an academy—
Tiger Kim’s—
and the master
didn’t want me working with his students
so he cleared the mats
and he and I had a spar instead—
only it quickly became a fight
and I knocked him down
and pounced on his neck
but I didn’t know enough;
my skills
were rudimentary;
he escaped—
escaped
and
	bucked
and
	flailed
and
	somehow
flipped me on my back
and demanded I give up,
but of course I refused so
he threw me and Robby
out of his gym.

And walking home in the twilight,
sweat still cooling on our skin,
we chucked it up,
Robby and me,
banged knuckles
and began to run:
comrades
on a wild afternoon in the mountains,
those long 
gone
impossible 
days
before iPhones.