Poem: "Glove"

*

It was as though the prime
of one's life were a glove
that one put on for a time
and took off

without anything
about the hand inside
changing
except that it was now outside

that is, it was still a hand
and did what a hand did
nothing had happened
to it yet it had been abandoned

or driven between gears if time were gears
or if time was just a mechanism
for maneuvring between months and years
like a dead machine that moved but was always the same,

then something was as wrong
as the glove pulled in reverse
whose fingers would now be fitting
a different universe,

with the life spilled
out of a container
first young then old
really neither.

The body was not a vehicle
or furnishing or mode, not a disguise
device or brace, nor some metaphysical
obstacle either -- there was no well known thing it was --

not sliced matter -- not in fact separate
from one's own awkward
attempts to fit it
within this or a different word.

So if he lived it was not because I
remembered him (because
even my poor memory
was less than what I once knew him as),

but could I say intrinsically?
There was a dancer's picture on my wall.
He filled his body ecstatically
but was flat as a stepped on snail.

He lived not
because I remembered him, no, the other way,
it was the life that was at the root
of what memory occurred today.

Life flexes
fingers in the glove
and seems more than it is
possible for anything to be made of.

It was not just life but his
life, not representative
just the single thing it was
and in that smallness alive

at least not otherwise,
because what
twisted in my gut was
him: the hook of him shifting in the gut.

Life covered the darkness with hair
and gave off the rude spring-green
ever-helpless odor
not of skin but of what has come to wear skin.

And one's own realization -- while it passed through
the place that aged and never aged,
would it too be able to
remain in the passing where it was wedged?