Whose sleeves: American Tagasode

Ed Roberson

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

Roberson reads "Whose sleeves: American Tagasode."

About This Poem

"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's most recently collection is Closest Pronunciation (Northwestern University Press, 2013). He is a Distinguished Lecturer Emeritus of English literature and creative writing at Northwestern University and lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Poetry by Roberson

Closest Pronunciation

(Northwestern University Press, 2013)

"Elegy with Clothes" by Bianca Stone

"The Floral Apron" by Marilyn Chin

"The Sadness of Clothes" by Emily Fragos

August Guest Editor: Ruth Ellen Kocher

Thanks to Ruth Ellen Kocher, author of Third Voice (Tupelo Press, 2016), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read a Q&A with Kocher about her curatorial approach this month and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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Tuesday, August 6, 2019