A boxer I once knew told me he used to put
his hands into the cherries each night like a hunter
might drape buck or lion skins over a stone
to show their original size,
preparing himself, he said, by thinking—
of the skeletal dog’s head he and his son found
in a washed away grave by the riverbank
out back, its bone and teeth so indistinguishable
from a wolf’s that it ruined
their weekly meeting—
or of what little he’s heard of the beating
I received that day in Sunday school
when, on asking the quiet teacher
if when God says “Worship no false idols
before me,” he’s implying he is a true idol—
or of that dockside pimp he used to frequent
after a stint at sea,
the one who carried penicillin and morphine
in a folded white doctor’s coat to clean his best
clients up before sending them back,
minus the memory of pain, to the women
waiting in the toilet stalls—
or of the night he caught his cat shitting
in the woods behind his home, her grace
swept away in one long crouch, the look over
her shoulder with jewelled eyes, the ginger
stepping away without a trace of shame—
or of what I mentioned of the gypsies in Rome,
how no babies were ever thrown at me,
but how one woman shoved her hand wrist-deep
in my pants as I boarded a tram
below the Vatican, trolling about for change
on the wrong side of a pocket,
how if I wasn’t being robbed
I might have paid her prettier cousin
for something similar—
or of that time at the coal docks in Cardiff when,
after months at sea and just one night
on a wooden pier, he suddenly realized that trees
were meant to be seen only by sunlight,
moonlight, and, so briefly, firelight—
or of the braggart hunter he killed with a single punch
in that Mexican cantina, how no one realized
the man was dead until the bartender tried to serve him
a consolation drink, pulling him down
like a sack of stone hammers,
his slumped, silent form falling heavily from the bar.