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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