The First Gentleman ★★★★

Of the four gentlemen

I was introduced first to bamboo

Watched the length of it rise from his motions

His hands thick around the handle

As the white drank in the blackness

Later he brought me to a garden

Some place I've lost to memory

And showed me the small copse

That some unknown hands had kept

He brought home some fallen stalks

And with me made a walking cane

I marveled that a thing so thin

Could so easily hold me

Those narrow poles

With their thin green leaves like sparrow wings

Are to certain people in places I've never been 

A symbol of summer

Of willpower tempered with flexibility

A symbol of virility and life

And I try to remember him as strong

As powerful and kind

Not as the sadness and the sense of being lost

That worried down his hill like shoulders

And has come to slip into my own life

Like echoes written in blood and kin

And not as it was in the end

As so much weight slipping through me

Without a way for me to hold it back

Without a way to bear the weight

With only old drawings

And hollow sticks