Amateur Fighter: for my father

What's left is the tiny gold glove

hanging from his lock opener chain. But,

before that, he had draw near to boxing,

as a stripling out of necessity-one-more reason

to stay away from abode go late

to that gelid house and dinner alone

in the dim kitchen. Perhaps he learned

just to receptacle a stepfather, then turned

that anger into a prize at the Halifax gym

Later, in fresh Orleans, there were the volumes

he couldn't stop reading. A scholar, his organ of visions

weakening. Fighting, then, a way to live

dangerously. He'd leave his brow tooth out

for pictures in the way that that I might understand

living meant suffering, los Really living

meant taking risks, thus he swallowed

a cockroach in a bar upon a dare, dreamt

of being a bullfighter. And at the gym

on Tchoupitoulas road he trained

his fists to strike into a bag

the storm of anger contained in his gentle hands.

The r headgear, hiding his face,

made me think he was someone other

that my father was somewhere other not here

holding his material part up to pain.

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Mar/Apr 1998

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