You’d have made a good Crusader Knight
(for Tony M.)
Michael Estabrook
Or a Samurai, perhaps, with that
iron heart discipline of yours, that
determination, the steady
striving for perfection, your purity and
consistency like a lighthouse beacon
in the darkest of nights. Your lifelong
dedication to the martial arts is
awe-inspiring, more a devotion to, a
consecration of the
martial arts really and not merely an
enhancing efficiency at punching, there’s
more to it than that, your art
is more vital than that. But alas
my friend it is difficult
for me to capture in words and words
are all I have for I
have studied words as you have studied
the generation of power,
the control of force. How shall
I say it: you are, you have become,
your martial arts, it is you
and you are it, molded
together inseparable as one, an astounding
enthalpy of inherent power, effectual,
primal, beautiful. There’s
a sanctification about you, I can feel
the edge of your being
like an etching in the air, in the space
around me, not taking-up space but
etching it. I recognize, too,
that you have not chosen
this “obsession,” that it has chosen
you and inhabits you like a
rapacious creature
and perhaps that’s what is so impressive
about it: an intangibility
assonant with Mozart’s genius or Patton’s
or Dante’s, a true talent a living
thing that takes you over and uses
you for the attainment
of its own designs. Oh I
don’t know, I’m merely casting about
searching as ever for the answers
to questions I can’t
even formulate. All I do know,
my old friend, is that you have it
and it felt good being close to it again
like in the old days, good to see
that some things do not diminish with
the passing of time, but instead ripen.
