Chivalric

Heraldry and all its lovely language; I chose my time there learning elsewhere, where else than land, Landscape, and how to live, in it is not like, nothing is like, the colors or the snow, it is not like pearl and it is not like the glitter of rainwater that darkens the bark against which the occasional bloom-laden branch might be seen shedding petals. No. Here is the past: One was once a boy and read books and could not pronounce the most engaging words and read in silence under blankets. Here one was not like oneself or was quiet and wrong and did not know the words nor how to ask, who to ask. Nor why. Boy’s books with flags. Everyone’s born to the language; anyone can say something. For instance, knight banneret, that’s what she called him, having no use for him after history, she thrust him into the operatic night: A woman’s hand rose above the surface of the lake and caught the glistering sword, and slowly descended into the boy’s refuge, his astonishment, so foreign, so little like home Knights Baronets— inferior barons formed by James I in 1611, the titles were sold and the funds went toward the plantation of Ulster. For this one would receive the right to a Field argent, a sinister hand couped the wrist gules. How foreign she was when God still cared. This is like a life, like a history built fluently, as if on the innocent, Boy-books and children’s crusades: The Reading (al-Korân) versus The Writing (Scripture). Isn’t it interesting, east / west, us / them? Everyone’s born to something. You should have feared the flick of my uncle’s thick wrist and the boat rides when he took me in those days, salt water in the bay and hard slaps against the hull, back from a day of horizons, of shrimp nets, I would lie on the bow feeling anger against my whole boy’s body as the engines uttered their single syllable for twenty miles back to land, a whine more terrible than laughter. The oral tradition, a voice hard and horrifying. One might have been a chevalier. Like someone from the books, was she beautiful? Was your mother lovely and a kind of landscape herself, like snow in dark woods, not like anything else?