So when I stepped off the plane and arrived here yesterday,
I was wearing one of those vests with a lot of pockets in it,
which I discovered is the perfect way for a woman
not to have to carry a purse.
And I'd been traveling around wearing that vest for quite
a few years.
And one day, I looked at it hanging over
the chair in my room, as it often is, and it became a poem.
And thus it is.
You look at something 110 times, and the 111th,
it suddenly says, oh, I have something to say.
"Vest."
"I put on again the vest of many pockets.
It is easy to forget which holds the reading glasses, which
the small pen, which the house keys, the compass and whistle,
the passport.
To forget at last for weeks even the pocket holding
the day of digging a place for my sister's ashes,
the one holding the day where someone
will soon enough put my own.
To misplace the pocket of touching the walls at Auschwitz
would seem impossible.
It is not.
To misplace, for a decade, the pocket of tears.
I rummage and rummage--
transfers for Munich, for Melbourne, to Oslo.
A receipt for a Singapore kopi.
A device holding music--
Bach, Garcia, Richter, Porter, Part.
A woman long dead now gave me, when I told her
I could not sing, a kazoo.
Now in a pocket.
Somewhere, a pocket holding a Steinway.
Somewhere, a pocket holding a packet of salt. Borgesian vest,
Oxford English Dictionary vest with a magnifying glass
tucked inside one snapped-closed pocket, Wikipedia vest, Rosetta
vest, enigma vest of decoding.
How is it one person can carry your weight for a lifetime, one
person slip into your open arms for a lifetime?
Who was given the world, and hunted for tissues,
for chapstick."