Stowaway

Stanley Moss

Aging, I am a stowaway in the hold of my being.

Even memory is a finger to my lips.

Once I entered down the center aisle

at the Comédie Française, the Artemis of Ephesus

on my arm, all eyes on her rows of breasts and me.

“Who is this master of her ninety nipples?”

the public whispered.

Now the ocean is my audience,

I see in secret my last secret.

Mid-December, my old felt hat that I could have imagined

myself leaving behind in a restaurant for eternity

blew out into the Atlantic. The damn thing so familiar

I saw myself wearing it even into the deep,

an aging Narcissus, in white foam and northern sunlight,

on my way to becoming a conch. It is like seeing music

this growing from flesh and bone into seashell:

undulating salts become a purple mantle,

and the almost translucent

bivalve of memory and forgetting closes.

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