O hefty hardcover on the built-in shelf in my parents’ living room, O authority stamped on linen paper, molted from your dust jacket, Questing Beast of blue and gold, you were my companion
on beige afternoons that came slanting through the curtains behind the rough upholstered chair. You knew how to trim a sail and how the hornet builds a hive. You had a topographical map
of the mountain ranges on the far side of the moon and could name the man who shot down the man who murdered Jesse James. At forty, I tell myself
that boyhood was all enchantment: hanging around the railway, getting plastered on cartoons; I see my best friend’s father marinating in a lawn chair, smiling benignly at his son and me
from above a gin and tonic, or sitting astride his roof with carpentry nails and hammer, going at some problem that kept resisting all his mending. O my tome, my paper brother,
my narrative without an ending, you had a diagram of a cow broken down into the major cuts of beef, and an image of the Trevi Fountain. The boarding house,
the church on the corner: all that stuff is gone. In winter in Toronto, people say, a man goes outside and shovels snow mostly so that his neighbors know
just how much snow he is displacing. I’m writing this in Baltimore. For such a long time, the boy wants to grow up and be at large, but posture becomes bearing;
bearing becomes shape. A man can make a choice between two countries, believing all the while that he will never have to choose.
Copyright © 2015 by James Arthur. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 16, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets. Reprinted with permission.
