Lately, the news has been following
The man who’s been lying in bed,
Too fat to rise, for fifteen years.
Now he’s lighter by a hundred pounds,
Standing in his doorway, but he can’t
Come out today, says, “I’m not ready,”
Though he may just be exhausted,
Puzzled that anyone would care about
The tentative steps of the obese.

Someone says, “He ate like a sweeper,”
And I title him Fat Man Hoovering,
Remember what I’ve learned about
The invention of the vacuum cleaner,
How the concept came to Cecil Booth,
Who put his lips to carpets and sucked
Dust to the ecstatic proof of choking.

Booth’s hotel room had residue
For a million tests, maybe a year’s
Worth of feasting for the dust mites
He didn’t see, those trenchermen
Of his carpet working nonstop
At feeding, growing invisibly fat;
And as the news drives elsewhere,
The dog looks up and listens and goes
To the door to growl at the unheard,
And all I’m believing, suddenly,
Is our personal range of senses
Has shrunk. That we could see those
Dust mites once. That we noticed what
Swarmed and fed. That we nearsighted
Ourselves to forget them, forget what
Towers over us, huge as the newscast’s
Fat man, who has five hundred pounds to go.

And I’m following the dog’s loud lead.
And I’m thinking, let all of these tenants
Step outside to the eyes of someone.
Let them blink a shy astonishment
At the lenses that admit them. And let
Them be changed and go on changing
And float like dust mites, their bodies
So light in death they rise from our
Carpets like souls, ascending, perhaps,
To ceilings or settling again on our beds,
Gone to some paradise of lost skin that
Tumbles from the nerve ends of the living.