for i have known the world

the life and death of a foam roller

for i have known the world: street lamps through a window in Shanghai, hiss and steam, the soft palms of a child’s hands tucking me in foam.

i have known youth at sea, my brave companions huddled beside me in the hold, dreaming of the world to come. i do not know what became of them.

i have known the tumbling of city streets, the clatter of the hand truck, the heights and depths of merchant shelves. men and women held me to the light, gazing deeply, testing their dreams against me. i saw hope in a thousand faces.

i have lived in the fragrance of warm cotton above the mighty rumbling of dryers, outlasted a legion of bare bulbs that set like suns, ranged about me by garments piled as mountains. i have made my bed with the runaway socks and the ragged cloth and the burned-out nightlight. i have been born into the resolutions of January, abandoned in March dust, and born again.

i have known sorrow in the darkness of a basement broom closet, longing to press my dimpled flesh into supple thigh, to know the dew of surrendered spine.

in my grief i took refuge in a torn cascade of drapes beneath a king-sized bed, and in the darkness there, i knew friendship, settled by the purring chin and the warm breath of a house cat, royal and patient and wise.

i have known the rainy stoop and the sunlit brownstone, the rummage sale and the giveaway box, tobacco dirt, palaces of cardboard and glass.

i have stood eye to eye with dogs, large and small. they retreated, all.

i do not know what is to befall me in this modest encampment, but here i stand. my scars are stories and my wounds gratitude.

for i have known life, and i will carry the memory of the arch of a grandchild’s foot rolling upon my back, the sudden flight, and a single burst of glorious locomotion.