Dobyns, "How You Are Linked"

There are days when you wake and your body
feels too long or too short, like a shirt
shrunk in the wash, or a fisherman’s net
that has somehow ensnared you, and it feels

as if your body were swapped in the night
for the body of a stranger, and your whole day
is spent searching. Whose body am I wearing,
where has my old self gone off to? If it is winter,

then it is raining. If summer, then the day
is thick with humidity and hot, and fat
clouds jerk across the sky like stupid thoughts.
These are the days when closets are searched,

when you find yourself standing in a corner
of the cellar not knowing how you got there,
when your body keeps slipping from your shoulders
or gripping you too tightly around the neck;

when you yell at your wife without reason
and your children avoid you and the dog hides
under a bush. But then sometimes it happens
that late in the afternoon, you decide

that the body you are wearing belongs to someone
you knew as a child, a kid up the street
or a girl with braces or a third grade boy
who was never popular and whom you teased

with the rest, putting a dead frog in his desk
or pinning a kick me sign to the collar
of his shirt, but now he is grown up and maybe
he works for a bank or is a radio engineer

but he still has two left feet and a hestitant
way of talking and somehow in the night
you have gotten his body, even though
you haven’t seen him for thirty years or know

whether he lives in Detroit or Schenectady,
but it must be him because you recognize
the way he hunched his shoulders and kept
his body clenched, and you recall how once

you stood by as the class bully baited him
into tears while you shuffled your feet
and did dnothing, or when you discovered
he liked some girl, you mocked her shyness

or fatness or dumbness until he was forced
to ridicule her just to keep some scrap
of self-respect, and now you are stuck
in his body and it feels like a discarded

high school locker that you have gotten yourself
crammed into with snapped-off hooks and rusty
hinges and a defective combination lock
and you can’t seem to get out or know how

to get back to yourself again or why
you ever treated this boy so badly with his
funny walk or legs which must have been
too tight just as they are too tight for you.

Such is your mental tumult and tangle
that you drag through the day unable to speak
to your wife or daughters who don’t know why
you are acting so strangely, who don’t realize

you are trapped in the adult body of a boy
you abused so long ago. But perhaps because he
crowds your thoughts, that night you dream of him
and he doesn’t look too peculiar even though

his red hair still sticks up in back. Is he
wearing your body? You can’t be sure, but yes
it suits him pretty well and he moves it
confidently and without discomfort. How

is his life different from yours? He tells you
of an adequate job, of a family who loves him,
and you begin to think how good he looks,
how in fact your lives are almost identical:

two men with the same neckties, same chitchat,
same shaggy dogs; and even though you don’t
discuss the past somehow an understanding
is reached, workds of affection are exchanged,

and after promising to write he fades off
into the confusion that borders all your dreams.
When you wake in the morning, you touch yourself
all over. This bag of flesh, is it yours or his?

Then you recognize a mole, a scar and soon
you conclude that your old body is your burden
once again. Joyfully, you leap from bed.
But isn’t this the moment when you should stop

and recollect, when you should write yourself
a little note just so you won’t forget how it felt
to be lost in another man’s body, how entangled
it got, how claustrophobic and how guilty

you felt? But of course you don’t because
you are too excited and the sky is welcoming
and the streets are full of people to be touched,
and you rush off to the old patterns, old mistakes,

your own personal combination of running
and falling, as you grow ever more separate,
more isolated, pursuing your path like a crook
alone in a bank vault, until again the world

must remind you of how you are linked, grabbing
your lapels and smacking your face, hurling you
into a stranger’s body. Who’s this? you say,
as if it were some stray beauty, the seduced

victim of late night desire. But hidden within
this newcomer lurks only yourself: the monster,
the treasure, the curiosity you have passionately
tried to decipher for all the years of your life.


Stephen Dobyns