Pockets

Pockets 

I wonder what men did before
their pants had pockets. Where did Keats
for instance put his ink stained hand
to rest its cramp? The priests had sleeves
on their long robes in which to clasp
their mitts in piety. But where
did other men hide sweaty palms
and awkward knuckles standing in
a crowd or sauntering alone
into a strange room? Pockets are
a comfort, not only a place
to hide our nervous itchy fingers
but a refuge of warmth and dark
as cozy as a kitten, always 
at sides like holsters for our most
deadly and versatile thumbs. Hands
in pockets are a sign of shyness
and even peacefulness. Hands need
a place of privacy and safety, 
a place of repose and muffling, need
dens in which to burrow deep
with coins and keys and pocket knives
and puffs of lint as soft and as
familiar as little pets, before
we pull a paw into the light
and shake a truce, instead of fight. 

Vol. 36, no. 2, 2008

Robert Morgan is the author of several books of poems, including Terroir (2011) and Dark Energy (2015). He has published ten books of fiction, among them the New York Times bestseller Gap Creek, and, more recently, Chasing the North Star (2016), and In the Snowbird Mountains and Other Stories (2023). His works of nonfiction include Lions of the West (2011), the national bestseller Boone: A Biography (2007), and Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (2023). Recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is currently Kappa Alpha Professor of English (Emeritus) at Cornell University.