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Pegging
out shirts on my first-floor balcony,
I
happen to notice a white, wire coat hanger
dangling
from one low branch of the tree
right
by our neighbour's garden.
What's
it doing there?
*
Perhaps
it's a homage to Jasper Johns
for
six months here in the Korean War,
or
in memory of the feelings of his friend
who
remembered a 'loneliness' from seven years before
'drifting
into my ears off Sendai in the snow...'
(but
where he saw that whiteness during August '45
I
don't for the life of me know).
*
Well,
yes, I suppose it could be mine,
blown
about by a wind
that
unhooks the things you can hang on a line
or
bough: an abandoned black plastic umbrella,
the
strips of white paper containing bad fortunes,
tied
in neat bows, transferred to the tree
-
which seems to have absorbed them;
spirited
away the luck; at any rate, survived.
*
Though
camouflaged, now
that
one more layer of overlapping greens
has
painted out winter, some distant love's
skin
can still be glimpsed through freckled tones
of
bark, sap, chlorophyll; like a phantom limb,
tanned
patches come, pale down, a hand --
and
so much else that could depend
on
a coat hanger among the leaves.
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