My Plastic Christmas Knight 1 & 2

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.