Sweater

I started this many, many years ago. Poem, prose, poem, prose. Not satisfied. Unfinished. After 8?10? years of 'not there yet' I realized the narrator had more to say, a conclusion. So I paused, listened to the words behind the words, to what happened after the Great Ending. And then I knew.  While we can't go back, we can't keep turning ourselves into pillars of salt. we can keep a few pieces, light a candle, sing a reprise. 

Opening another box of clothes, winter clothes this time-

How many years since I needed winter clothes,

since I lived in a land of slush and ice-broken trees?

Here, despite the perpetual August of Florida,

I wear long sleeves to protect myself from

excessive air-conditioning

or perhaps to hide the knife calligraphy

paisley tribal keloids

trailing around my wrists

handwriting on concrete walls

not yet driven into.

I place more shirts on

another shelf and take

another pile out of a

maw-gape box.

 

Where did that come from?

How in god’s good name did that end up here?

I’ve moved so many times since then, since that life,

at least a dozen times in the past year alone,

from car

to shelter

to bedsit

to short stay

to extended stay

to here,

finally,

a place that I can call my own

and now this? 

 

That old fisherman sweater he wore.Once.

Fifteen? Twenty? years ago.

It still smells of him.

 

That sweater. My fingers tremble, reach out

to the sweater that escaped Goodwill

and garbage and abandonment

to the sweater that somehow hung onto

 a fragment of a shadow of me

to the sweater still in the box and

I stroke it with fingertips. 

 

Kiss them,

as if they had just touched the Torah, the holy book, 

pick up the sweater, hold it to my cheek, eyes closed.

Kneeling by that box, swaying slightly,

time slows to stop.

 

It still smells of him,

testosterone musk and the chemical reek

of stage two alcoholism.

Rising bile squeezes my trachea,

his hands around my throat,

fingerprint dust in my nose,

so hard to breathe, let alone think.                 

Rubbing my face on it, inhaling him,

the texture of him on my skin,

remembering it as a Proustian call,

as a seismic vibration,

as a marker in my DNA. 

 

His Jack Daniels-coated tongue against mine,

now moving over me, lapping at the whiskey,

spilt by clinking glasses,

the whiskey pooled in my navel,

white powder fueled laughter

emerging between numbed kisses. 

 

I can feel him.

 

Oh god, I remember.

I am doomed to remember.

 

I stand, slip my arms into

that sweater he wore,

that sweater he wore

once

and only once,

and made his own. 

Hands trace the cables, in out, in out, in out.

Pull it down over face, neck, torso, smooths

the soft cotton over breasts that he touched,

held, loved, so long ago,

pulls the sweater all the way down to my hips. 

Lean against the wall,

as his phantom grinds against me.

                       

I slide down the wall to the floor. 

Wrap my arms,

warm sweatered arms

around my knees and bury my face in them.

I drown my lungs in nicotine ghosts,

a beached creature seeking oxygen

in an alien place. 

 

“Mama, mama, we’re hungry. We want lunch.”

My children call from the next room.

“Just a sec, sweeties.”

I pull that sweater off,

drop it on the floor. 

“Mac and cheese or sandwiches?”