Over the past year or so, I
have lost the weight
of a grandchild or a
microwave, five bowling
balls or housecats, or a large
bag of sugar.
The sugar is perhaps most apt,
given that
most of the extra weight I had
been carrying
around all those years could
be distilled
into a (large) powdered pile
of sugar and a soupรงon
(or so) of rendered bacon fat.
I can see your eyes
going glassy already, so let
me assure you
this will not be a poetic
memoir about my
struggle—some might call it
heroic—to pull
myself back from the brink,
wrestle that obese
monkey from my back. Nor will
it be my thirty-
point plan which I will then sanctimoniously
advise you to follow if you
know what’s good
for you, no sestina version of
Sweatin’ to the Oldies.
People like hearing about how
you lost weight
the same way they want to hear
how your dreams
have become more vivid since
menopause. No,
this feels like part of a more
general plan—
though entirely unplanned—to
pare down, un-
load, hold an estate sale before
the fact, reduce
my life to its lowest common
denominator.
I’m letting the books go, the
CDs, taking boxes
of XXLs to Goodwill, eBaying
the Pez dispenser
collection; everything must
go. I’m saying no,
I’m scrivening, “I would
prefer not to” on RSVPs,
I’m truant, AWOL, gone
missing. This is not,
though, as far as I know, that
pre-demise sloughing-
off, putting post-it notes on
my cherry wood
highboy so the relations won’t
squabble over it.
This is me sitting in the
woods beneath
a Douglas Fir, next to a
stream so clear I can see
trout leaning into the
current, on the other side
of which a doe comes leading
her young fawn
into a clearing, sees the
stream and the tree, and,
seeing me, sees nothing that
shouldn’t be there.(published in Frontier Poetry, 2017)
No comments:
Post a Comment