Giving away clothes
you wore so perfectly in
life. The silver bean
necklace, the boiled wool
blue jacket from Austria.
Your girlfriends love them.
They have new life now.
I have a hard time moving
on. I make a fool
of myself: a neck-
lace, a blue coat: it’s not you.
Oh, nothing like you.
The poem turns on the clause ‘I make a fool/ of myself’. The poet is both pitiable (if not risible) in his grief and wise in his simultaneous love for and understanding of the limitations of the clothes that remind him of the beloved departed (they are not you). This double experience of loss and love gives the poem its expressive and emotional reach for the reader.
<
div dir=”ltr”>Thanks, Steve. This took shape