Before the blade cuts
me it cuts through the air aired live
into the living rooms and kitchens of a million watchers
its beautiful curved edge so solidly fused to the handle
held tightly by the dark skinned hand
of the man in ceremonial dress who danced a little jig
as he brandished the saber it glinted in the stage lights
orange like a very old page folded stiffly from the binding
all the faces briefly come into focus on the polished metal
as it hurls towards my exposed white neck I could be a map
of the united states now a pale white solid block
of repulsive skin movie screen footage plays of the bombs
impact against the kitchen wall where two young cousins
played checkers on the black and red cardboard beside the glasses
empty except for a few bubbles of milk crumbs on the white china
thin veins show through my skin like rivers
after the blade cuts through I will look like a map of iraq
headless hacked violently into regions each part shaded
like the subtle difference in skin color of all the watching faces
the blade as it spins towards me looks impossibly old
I imagine a master smith fifteen hundred years ago who secretly
kept the best blade hidden from the prince who commissioned
his work so that he could give it to his son whose left arm
had been lame from birth so he never could do what the father does
though his eyes glinted when he stared into the forge
and the father recognized that he wanted what he couldn’t have
his mother had died in childbirth and soon the boy
would have nothing a blade would be something
he could hold on to and use to protect himself
with his one good hand and remember that his father had tried
to love him even when he felt in his lungs a deep cough
that he knew would soon take him swift and certain like a hot
desert breeze at midnight so he forged the blade while
my ancestors ran around in skins wielded clubs and the man
with the strongest club arm called himself “Lord” but left off
“of ignorance” the full title I realize that I owe
a huge part of my mind to the scholars who kept
all the books I read as a teenager safe while europe burned
with raw exposed barbaric greed I sat on a rock
half submerged in the grassy field down the path
a half mile from my high school alone in the bright
afternoon sun perched close enough to the stream
to hear it between wind gusts but not to see
all the leaves it carried on the impossibly blue water
that glided by the muddy banks so quickly
that it didn’t disturb them urgent invisible I never thought
that the people who kept those ancient books I read and formed
into knowledge would some day come to reclaim them
in their present form soft tissue and take with it
the eyes that skated across the icy page
the tongue that tasted sour traces of each page
on my fingertips when I turned them the saliva
I swallowed a sliver of my spine that tingled all the hairs
on the back of my neck and what I remember
of the smell of old pages flushed cheeks
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