Lament for a Sweater
A poem
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 cycle in which all great sweaters die,
torn and sewn a thousand times.
My once black sweater, patched and grey …
I left it on the trunk of the car that drove away.