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
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