In a way many of my artist friends were prepared for a pandemic. They tend to prefer their studios to a more social life. When artists are at their best they look at the most difficult things in our society, digging to find an alternative way to navigate into current events. There are times when that digging feels like searching in our pockets for reading glasses, house keys, or a passport but at other times we find tears, meaning, and forgotten memories.
VEST
I put on again the vest of many pockets.
It is easy to forget
which holds the reading glasses,
which the small pen,
which the house keys,
the compass and whistle, the passport.
To forget at last for weeks
even the pocket holding the day
of digging a place for my sister’s ashes,
the one holding the day
where someone will soon enough put my own.
To misplace the pocket
of touching the walls at Auschwitz
would seem impossible.
It is not.
To misplace, for a decade,
the pocket of tears.
I rummage and rummage—
transfers
for Munich, for Melbourne,
to Oslo.
A receipt for a Singapore kopi.
A device holding music:
Bach, Garcia, Richter, Porter, Pärt.
A woman long dead now
gave me, when I told her I could not sing,
a kazoo.
Now in a pocket.
Somewhere, a pocket
holding a Steinway.
Somewhere, a pocket
holding a packet of salt.
Borgesian vest,
Oxford English Dictionary vest
with a magnifying glass
tucked inside one snapped-closed pocket,
Wikipedia vest, Rosetta vest,
Enigma vest of decoding,
how is it one person can carry
your weight for a lifetime,
one person
slip into your open arms for a lifetime?
Who was given the world,
and hunted for tissues, for chapstick.
–Jane Hirshfield, in Ledger, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020