Archive 02/05/09 - (1)

   

Losing Weight

                                                                         

One inadmissible morning,

Getting dressed, to go to your family-medicine practice,

You got lost in clothes grown too loose, overnight.

 

Your calf-length socks mistook your feet for dog paws;

Your boxer shorts refused to stay put, on your hips;

Your dress shirt was the mainsail of a clipper ship;

 

Your banker's-stripe navy-blue suit

Doubled as the big-top tent of a small-town circus

(Your muted silk tie, leather belt never left their racks);

 

As for your spit-shined wing-tip shoes,

They could have been Goliath's sandals;

Your flesh dripped like Spanish moss, from your skeleton.

 

How such a catastrophe could have taken place,

Between midnight and six, without awakening you,

Would have been preposterous, were it not so shocking.

 

You were a complete stranger to things like this.

That you could have jettisoned seventy-five pounds, in hours,

Just by sleeping, breathing, dreaming...

 

Dreaming...dreaming — that was it, wasn't it?

Hadn't you been hiding again,

As you had on so many nights, since the early '40s,

 

Hiding, in a constant state of agitated, desperate surveillance,

In the Warsaw Ghetto's shadowy labyrinth —

That rat maze of corridors, alleys, attics, basements, sewers —

 

Ever fleeing, retreating, evading, freezing, fainting,

Always too hungry to eat, gradually losing so much weight

That your loss saved you from being seen, caught?

 

You'd been reduced to a brittle piece of straw,

Which was what your oversize clothing awakened to,

On that inadmissible morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

02/05/09 - (1)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
       

 

 
   
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