The Wooden Overcoat

It turns out there’s a difference between a detail

and an image. If the dandelion on the sidewalk is

mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicep

is an image because it moves when her body does,

even when a shirt covers the little thorny black sun

on a thin stalk. The same way that the bar code

on the back of another friend’s neck is just a detail,

until you hear that the row of numbers underneath

are the numbers his grandfather got on his arm

in a camp in Poland. Then it’s an image, something

activated in the reader’s senses beyond mere fact.

I know the difference doesn’t matter, except in poetry,

where a coffin is just another coffin until someone

at a funeral calls it a wooden overcoat, an image

so heavy and warm at the same time that you forget

it’s about death. At my uncle’s funeral, the coffin

was so beautiful it was like the chandelier lighting

the room where treaties are signed. It made me think

of how loved he was. It made me think of Shoshone

funerals, where everything the dead person owned

was put into a bonfire, even the horse. In that last

sentence, is the horse a detail or an image? I don’t

really know. In my mind, a horse is never anywhere

near a fire, and a detail is as luminous as an image.

The trumpet vine on the sagging fence. The clothes

in the fire. And each tattoo that I touch on your back:

the three-part illustration of how to use chopsticks,

the four-leaf clover, the clock face stopped at 12:05.