Rarefied

This sweater is made from only the finest, softest underhairs of the Mongolian camel.

“Fancy-schmancy,” my father would have said,

whose snazziest sweater was still a declassé

synthetic from the sweatshops of Taiwan. My friend

Deloris, however, who really owns such clothes,

would say “exquisite” or “sublime”—her opened closet’s

row of shoulders teases late-day bedroomlight

along such textures, there are days when the laboring brain

and throbbing crotch appear to us to be not much more

than her wardrobe’s tasteful accessories. “. . . woven

from genital-down of prepubescent yeti, and then

hand-sewn in our undersea domes.” “Untouched

by anyone other than albino elves, this wool is . . . .”

______________

Rarefied—to Helthi Hart, the diet guru, it’s

a cup of clear organic cauliflower broth. And for

the Emperor Excessia, it’s a mad dessert of swans’ tongues

—there were, what? ten thousand?—dipped in a slip

of stiffening honey and set out to await the banqueteers

like a field of fresh shoots they could graze.

Some Roman party hosts had great roped bowls of snow

brought from the mountaintops to entertain their guests

with dishes of rose-petal sherbet and chilled roe.

They might even allow the household slaves to slide

leftover snow along the burning welts the ropes ate

into their shoulders all down the mountainside.

______________

Afterwards it was an unrecognizable tatter.

But an image of my father’s worn-thin Bargain City

“all-weather” jacket is still whole in its polyester glory.

This is what happened: the alley dog (he later called the thing

a “cur”) had cornered Livia, and she screamed once,

with a seven-year-old’s unselfconscious terror.

And then my father was there, with his jacket wound around his arm,

and a rock. When it was over, he tore the sleeves off, tied the poor dog

quiet and, after comforting Livia, they both kneeled down

to comfort the dog. He was like that. And the jacket

that served as weapon and restraint?—was like him,

every day of his life. It did what was needed.

______________

I misread “migraine.” Which of the two

would we call the most rarefied? “Margarine”?

Or maybe comparison isn’t the point. A ghost

is a person rarefied through the fine, fine colander

death; that doesn’t make, for most of us, extinction

an ideal. It was hard to think of Frank and Deloris

divorcing, since it was hard to imagine the two of them

engaging in anything so mundane as sex or rage or envy

with the rest of the hoi polloi. They seemed unearthly

in close to a literal way, like radio waves. And yet divorce

they did. They found something real they could unjoin,

hertz from hertz until there just was air.

______________

A dream: We own the softest of the soft

Mongolian camel underhair sweaters. One day

(we think we’re doing the “right thing”) we release it

into the wild, to romp with its brother and sister

desert sweaters, out where it “belongs.”

You know, however, what happens by now: it’s unfit

to fend for itself amid that hardened herd.

They beat it. It’s hungry. It crawls back

into the city, mewing, curling up at night against a door

my father opens and, seeing something in need, brings it inside,

wraps it in flannel. That’s how he was.

He’d give you the cheap shirt off his back.

Source: Poetry (October 1999)