11-07-2017, 12:42 PM
The Point by Paul Muldoon
Not Sato’s sword, not Sato’s ‘consecrated blade’
that for all its years in the oubliette
of Thoor Ballylee is unskilled, keen,
lapped yet in the lap of a geisha’s gown.
Not the dagger that Hiroo Onoda
would use again and again to undo
the frou-frous, the fripperies, the Fallopian
tubes of a dead cow in the Philippines.
What everything in me wants to articulate
is this little bit of a scar that dates
from the time O’Clery, my school-room foe,
rammed his pencil into my exposed thigh
(not, as the chronicles have it, my calf)
with such force that the point was broken off.
Not Sato’s sword, not Sato’s ‘consecrated blade’
that for all its years in the oubliette
of Thoor Ballylee is unskilled, keen,
lapped yet in the lap of a geisha’s gown.
Not the dagger that Hiroo Onoda
would use again and again to undo
the frou-frous, the fripperies, the Fallopian
tubes of a dead cow in the Philippines.
What everything in me wants to articulate
is this little bit of a scar that dates
from the time O’Clery, my school-room foe,
rammed his pencil into my exposed thigh
(not, as the chronicles have it, my calf)
with such force that the point was broken off.