Physical Education

For the sake of argument, let’s say

the day my father outlawed all contact

between backhand and face, back

-side and belt, stiletto cast like a harpoon

across the living room’s auburn length

and the protagonist running toward the opposite

door, was a Thursday. And let’s say the logic

of  his claim went that if  he & everyone else

in the house could hit me then, while I was still small,

I would one day grow to be a bomb like so many

brothers he’d seen held up & buried for tempers

flaring in open air. A beating now would be a book

-mark in my memory’s eye; a black mark on the calendar

I kept inside; a day he would be made to meet me

in the square. Every little boy’s brain keeps score. And who

among us hasn’t been held, helpless, before? At the feet

of mercy or underneath them. From that day forward,

I was counters to every command, a conflagration

of untamed language, now detached from a program

of corporal might. The lesson took. I was tall as a man

the next time my father and I shook the house with

our rage and shame. We breathed like dancers,

and allowed our hostility to take its form,

my teenage fists honed in the outside world

where no one loves you enough

to let the boy back up when he loses,

grant him a moment to shake the dust,

knuckle up, try his luck, again.