Lifting Weights

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 soupçon

(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)