Button Coat, Gift of Mrs. Cecil Cowell 
                             Grand Rapids Public Museum 

Not septuplets, a paisley 
of embryos in the womb, 
and not matches in a book,  
an incendiary choir— 

my parts are not a brood 
waiting to be born or undone,  
each a short-lived excuse  
for its own tongue of fire.  

If they are a brood, my parts 
are a world: children 
in foxholes and women 
up to their elbows, 

up to their necks, a crow, 
a matriarch; one self is a man  
who pounds on a table, one self 
is a priest who knocks on a door.  

. . . 

Maybe I would tell you  
I was a sleeve of selves if I had not  
gone to the museum and seen 
the peacoat covered in buttons, 

an armor of wafers—xylonite 
and mother-of-pearl; buckhorn;  
the ivory shanks, each a loose tooth— 
the thing about a button coat 

is its weight. And a button? 
The thing about a button  
is that it’s a stop gap, it’s how 
you fill a hole. It’s how you hold 

things together, how you make  
yourself decent. Which is also 
the thing about a part: it’s how  
you filled a hole. It’s how you held  

things together, how you made 
yourself decent, fit to go out. 
Yes, yes, and fit to go on—a part  
is how you made yourself.