Something Solid: Miscellaneous Sonnets: Frontiersman

 

I was unaware, until Jon Anderson jolted us into
awareness, that there could be a baby version of
a Bowie knife. The seminar room sloped upwards
from the front; Mr. Anderson levitated, with lascivious
abandon, above us, as the baby Bowie did its mischievous
task of shearing one white slat of the blinds in half.
Jon crouched like a frontiersman skinning what itself could
have been a mischievous rattlesnake, the snakeskin a prize
or trophy to adorn an abode not much less primitive than
a tee-pee, the frontier half-conquered. I did not need
a reason, then or now, to understand why the emergence
of the baby Bowie was necessary. But I carried with me
the brotherly love that, from Philadelphia to New Hampshire,
affirmed that displayed force could be a necessary weapon, even among poets.