Richard Jones Poem

Shadowboxing

by Richard Jones

You are the shadow, the shadow is you,
William says as we walk home from the pool
in wet bathing suits, shadowboxing.
It’s the sort of thing he says now and then,
a koan, the Zen wisdom of his six-year-old mind.
And of course what he has observed, or rather,
the enlightened perspective he is wont to teach
his increasingly absentminded, unseeing father,
is both true and useful, and I am suddenly ashamed
of the little regard I’ve had for my own shadow,
constant companion that stretches arms wide across
late-afternoon lawns, looms at night on alley walls,
or melts into nothing to hide from the noonday sun.
I would ask him to teach me more, but when we
stop on the corner, waiting to cross with the light,
I look down at the child’s shadow beside the man’s:
William’s small arms hooking and jabbing, two fists
knocking some sense into the darkness of his father’s head.

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