The Puppet Tiger Masculinity Is

When I say tiger: I mean the catatonic one,
of William Blake, its roar stalled while rising
between the diaphragm and the uvula.
Or I could mean my Daniel, the flattened,
ineffectual puppet tiger of my childhood.
He seemed to lack a mandible: the voice spoke
feebly from outside his body. My father’s name
was Daniel. His father’s name was Daniel.
In the Land of Make Believe they all set out
to find Blake’s Tyger once and for all.
It takes them over fifty years, the age I am now,
until they come across it among leaves falling
in their eighteenth-century cursive against the sky.