Whose Sleeves: American Tagasode
your shape is in the robe worn or not
a roominess of you folds into its cloth
a sachet in the drawer from which the air
of the place was taken fixed of you’re here
the smell has temperature and space
the wider warmth that buttered popcorn tastes
and not you it folds into a time’s clot
a sachet in a drawer personage of its own still you
*
I have to wear a bus to Rikers Island with
opaque tears up to my neck to get in to see you
in your two inch thick glass robe I have to imagine
you naked under to place my hand saying
I miss you against you where I can’t touch and love
has to break across insulating space still warm
I have to stand my day in the folding up put away
given you as time with you. I smell I need you on my clothes
*
I smell gunfire folded in to every turn
the city’s track laps into its hands on race
then files away not guilty I smell the drawers
of the records they keep folded away from stands taken
away distance doesn’t dissipate
the space between the bullet holes in you in me folded
you are the map I have to sleep with in my pocket to be sure
I know how to get out of here
*
your shape is in the robe the sharp creases
of its fold when you wore it blocked into
the counterpoint around you that even
folded stood you out to me that they couldn’t
see you that one day they would shoot
always folded into the robe you wore
gun or not phone mistaken or empty handed innocent
or not there is this fold on itself we sleep in
in the fabric
of this country’s culture
Copyright © 2019 by Ed Roberson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 6, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The word tagasode translates from the Japanese as ‘whose sleeves.’ The phrase comes from an elegy collected in the Kokinshū, an Imperial Japanese anthology compiled by four poets including Ki no Tsurayuki and first published circa 905 CE. The elegy, addressed to the poet’s dead wife upon smelling her perfume in the kimono folded beside their bed, opens with these lines: ‘whose sleeves have brushed past / or would it be this plum tree blossoming here at home.’ In Japanese culture, tagasode has come to name not just a genre of love poetry but also a form of still life composed of folded kimono patterns, reflecting the idea that personal objects contain a person’s spirit even in the person’s absence.”
—Ed Roberson
Ed Roberson
Ed Roberson was born in 1939 in Pittsburgh. He earned his BA at the University of Pittsburgh and later completed graduate work at Goddard College. His first collection of poetry, When Thy King Is a Boy (Pitt Poetry), was released in 1970, the same year in which he completed his undergraduate degree.