Good will

Good Will

Sorting clothes, I find our son's old            
jeans, the dirt worn so deeply in            
they are almost tan, worked as a palimpsest,
the nub down to a flat gloss,
the metal of the rivets soured to ochre,
the back pockets curved like shields,
their stitching is like water far from land,
a long continuous swell. Lee,
the pants say in auric print,
LEE, they say in letters branded            
in leather on the waistband, like the voice of a boy's
pants, the snap's rattle, the rough
descending and ascending scale of the zipper,
the coin-slot pocket inside the front pocket.
He had waited inside me so many years, his
egg in my side before I was born,
and he sprang fresh in his father that morning,
I had seen it long ago in science,
I shake out the jeans, and there are the knees
exploded, the white threads hanging
outside the body, the frail, torn,
blue knee open, singing of the boy.
 
Sharon Olds

www.johnsiddique.co.uk