Lament for a Sweater

A pocket knife, a set of keys …

these are things I could believe

I would misplace — I would not grieve

a set of keys; I would replace them.

But a sweater, shrunken at the sleeves, and bleached

at the collar, with a zipper so precocious

I could not coax the thing to feed — and I tried! —

should not have gone the way it did; it should have died

in the great life...