Enter Master Li Mu Bai
in the courtyard with the sword

stolen from warrior to warrior.
Enter me and the boy:

he was drunk, seventeen,
and I was not. In the woods,

the fog rank like warm milk,
we were lost so we slept

in my tent, its copper frame
forming a bell around us, and I

its tongue tolling. Outside, fiddleheads
were bowled over, fog left gaped

where we stepped, rain
on the canopy. He tried to sleep

shivering and crooked from desire
in the tent’s corner, an egg

just begun to crack
and this the surrounding nest: suction

of language, fungus scaling bark, young
creatures grown over fissure

and texture, loam sprung
with mushrooms in first light—

but I have no interest
in explaining which ones

not to eat. In this scene, I am not
Li Mu Bai. I am the sword:

the one to be gripped, pinned
like a weapon and whirred

into rapine, wielded through the night

and by daybreak be stolen once more.