1.
When I was nine, sick on Santa’s eve,
My mother & father & sister &
brother
Came to my room to cheer me & sing
carols.
They gave me a plastic molded knight
Mounted on a white horse & armed
With a lance & sword & shield.
Two inches high.
I carried him with me out of childhood.
He lost his sword in a fall this
morning,
Weaponless he nonetheless stands guard
again.
2.
His helmet gone, his lance lost, his
sheathed knife
long disappeared and his scabbard empty
for years now, he
sits on his white horse - two of his
legs gnawed off by
my dog, teeth marks sunk deep into his
armour. His Grail
Quest still unfinished, he is propped
up in the forest of
a house plant, encircled by a branch
like a serpent grasping
its tail in its mouth. He stands,
hobbled before a leaf bridge
within that mythic ring, like Lancelot
drained of life by
his desire for Guinevere. Light, shafts
through the curtains
in the study window & falls like a
road on the far end of his bridge.
When next I notice him, one of my cats
has dug him out of the plant & he
lies on his side, his horse
on top of him, his head turned to the
garden out the window.
Like Merlin I assure my plastic
Christmas knight that he can’t
just lie there and wait for the cats to
pee on him, To prove
to him that he's not doomed to that fate, I move him to a sill
where a line of shells & stones & other shoreline debris
lie beneath a goblet of towering blue
glass.
