We spend our first years
learning to dress ourselves,
as in, look who put his shoes on
all by himself, or
what a big girl,
all those buttons!
After we discovered
that we couldn’t judge a book by its cover,
and that everyone didn’t always
mean what they said,
and that we would never,
as we once wanted, be a character in a book,
we sacrificed our innocence before
it turned out to have been
no better than our ignorance.
We still try things on:
taking time to read more cookbooks,
learning to assemble electronic devices without
existential despair and hurled instruction manuals,
trying to love the moronic neighbor down the road
with his guns and hysterical dogs,
looking back to see
not a life of losses and discards
but a fond trail of furnishings outgrown.
It’s not that we may not have
the occasional embarrassment
over things that we have done
(the unaccustomed earring still on
as we crawl into bed),
and the things we have left undone
(the barn door,
as we stroll into the cocktail party),
It’s just that now
some new sort of credulity beckons,
like that first Christmas morning
after we knew,
and yet had to walk on anyway,
toward the tree,
across a now grotesquely foreshortened living room,
remembering the perfectly contained skin
of our footed pajamas just a year before,
the first taste of something we’d later call
metaphor rising bitter in our mouths.
We still have our
baffled need to trust,
but more and more, we learn
to take things off,
to undress ourselves–
more disposed to meet,
almost naked,
the darkness and
the day.
___
Hadley Hury has published a novel (2003), a collection of stories (2007), and his short fiction and poetry have appeared in Colorado Review, Green Mountains Review, The Avatar Review, and Image.
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012 10:43 am
Categories: Issue 5.4, Poetry
