Ah, it took awhile to get there, Ken, but then paid off...tough love for that sweater long gone...
Doug
On Dec 18, 2013, at 9:46 AM, Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
> The Sweater
>
>
>
> So I bought a six buck acrylic sweater
>
> from a guy in his family's shop
>
> on lower Broadway, one of the old
>
> Civil War buildings where the ghosts walk.
>
> And I created my own ghost in the sweater.
>
> A schmata that I loved, that I inhabited
>
> because it bowed to my shape
>
> because it helped warm me on awful nights
>
> when the New York cold blew through me
>
> with what I saw as personal anger,
>
> a revolt against the wearer
>
> a cry of You are nothing without me.
>
> And I learned then to despise summer
>
> because I could not wear the sweater
>
> which grew rips in the underarms
>
> shreds in the seams.
>
> But as winters returned I did not care.
>
> I loved the tatty sweater and
>
> let it envelop me, a lover long missed
>
> and now returned, its anger spent,
>
> wanting only to embrace me in its fibers.
>
>
>
> When I married, my wife went through my clothes
>
> and seemed to gag at some of my choices.
>
> She hated the sweater and said
>
> it was baggy and made me look like hell,
>
> but I said I liked it and would
>
> just as soon darn and sew to hold it.
>
> But one day I came home and found
>
> she'd tossed it, put it out with the trash:
>
> and the sweater, unable to protest, assented.
>
> And after a shrug of feeble dismay, so did I.
>
>
>
> This was long ago, 1971, but maybe
>
> our fates and futures are descried
>
> by meaningless incidents, by behaviors
>
> that "set a tone" for what comes after.
>
> Maybe my wife, long cast off,
>
> has met the sweater again. Maybe
>
> inanimacy has the power of forgiveness.
>
> Or maybe not. Or maybe
>
> she has proved to be acrylic,
>
> a fibre set untrue as her husband,
>
> both of us woven from whole false cloth.
>
>
>
> December 2013
>
>
>
>
>
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
Latest books:
Continuations & Continuations 2 (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=962
Recording Dates
(Rubicon Press)
Swept snow, Li Po,
by dawn’s 40-watt moon
to the road that hies to office
away from home.
Lorine Niedecker
|