30:30 2013 - 16

Wendigo Psychosis

At Goodwill, a heap of used ties, good
ones: Lauren, Press, the bridle-bit
matrix of Hermès and Repp stripes
aligned like oars of a crew in synch.
By width and trend I see decades
piled up, but surely all retired
from the same neck.

In the North, the first people named
a kind of madness. Men would turn
cannibal from seeming desperation
though other food was close by.
A trapper ate his wife and child
rather than brave ten miles in modest
snow to the dry-goods store.
A soul becomes a wendigo,
the hungering thing that cannot
be sated: each time it feeds
on the flesh of men it grows
larger, into a larger starvation.

Everything is a dollar. No distinction
between fine and finest in the bin,
the subtle escalations that meant
an hour less with a warm blanket
or son. Worrying silk in a charity
shop, I think of being done. The collection
of things gone wholesale.
How that moment fills a man.