Peek

BEGINNING IN THE LOST AND UNCLAIMED BAGGAGE CENTER

IN SCOTTSBORO, ALABAMA

In that tumble of flotsam, that hall

of the mishandled and shunted

and slightly damaged and surely forgotten

and mostly never missed except

maybe to curse constant loss

that living is, I could not be

consoled, though I snickered

just the same as we all did

rifling the racks of red cheap negligees,

faux satin and wrongly

furred and crotchless

and sexlessly peek-a-boo

there in the open air

fallen far from the foreign nights

for which each had been

bought in arterial shame or embarrassment

though I hoped

not, though I imagined

one among them,

no different than the rest, no finer,

to be refugee

from an Eden

not entirely lost

or defiled

but I couldn’t be consoled

not even by

the greater strangeness we found further down,

the sacred undergarments

worn by Mormons

beneath their clothes

always when inside the temple,

that one of us bought

to wear for Halloween

parties, the long cover-alls stitched with arcanum

to protect from all

harm, to be kept

as secret as the wretched lace lost

in the tropics

and unfound, fretted over, finally forgotten

until reborn

mocked in Alabama,

a kind of karmic redundancy I could never escape,

not when the night

seemed to bleed heat

and the stars

throbbed in the last throes of incandescence

and the magnolias

larger than all

other life and green beyond green

sang the locust’s sawblade refrain long into the lost night.