The Sword & the Pen

So, have you been doing much sword-
fighting lately?
The boy asks because,
you know, fathers live forever and have
seen the history of the world enacted
around them, all of it, and most of it
they had a hand in, the piracy and dragon-
slaying, in particular.
There is not a thing, in fact,
they do not know or have not done.

Not much, I say. I’m getting a little rusty.
This is an unhelpful response.
He’s holding it: a scythe, a foundered tool.
An artifact he’s dug from his mother’s
vegetable patch.
A new moon already old.

It’s for sword-fighting, isn’t it?
he insists, more interested
in his metal than my metaphor. A child,
like most children, avid with the concrete poems
of which they know
the real world is really made.
Do you think that’s why it’s so rough?

Later we fight. He uses the rasp
we use to keep the edges of the knives
in the kitchen keen. And because, as he well knows,
the present belongs to him, he wins. He repels
my slow and antiquated thrusts and stabs me
twice. Once to finish me off. A second time
to start me up again.
To die again another day.