Made to Measure

Impossible to wield

The acreage of the fabric that unfolded,

Slung from his shoulders like a crumpled field:

The distance from one Christmas to the next

When he was only seven

Was aching there; a foreign city flexed

Among the ripples; a face, the star-shocked heaven

About his flailing arms were shrugged and moulded.

Too heavy to outrun,

Too slow to measure what it underwent,

Though gradually the passage of the sun,

Unmanageable in its train of light,

Seemed almost to respond

As he yanked the yards of stuff in like a kite

And gathered the brocade that trailed beyond

His arms' reach to the scale of measurement,

However strange the weave

That writhed about the working of his hands:

The footage too atrocious to believe,

Printed with corpses; Greece; the falls of salmon;

Her upturned silken wrist

He would have torn out history to examine;

His father's final blessing, which he missed.

However far he comes or where he stands,

At last, and limb by limb,

Contour by contour, that unfolded cape

Settles ever more fittingly on him.

His forehead is the line of the sky's vault,

His shoulders trace the ground,

His palms the ways he wandered by default,

And in his gestures those he knew are found.

What shape the day discovers is his shape.