Lament for a Sweater
A pocket knife, a set of keys…
these are things I could believe
I could misplace—I would not grieve
a set of keys; I would replace them.
But a sweater, shrunken at the sleeves, and bleached
at the collar, with a zipper so precocious
I could not coax the thing to feed—and I tried!—
should not have gone the way it did; it should have died
in the great life cycle in which every sweater dies,
torn and sewn a thousand times.
My once black sweater, patched and gray…
I left it on the trunk of the car that drove away.
