Jacob Eigen

Strength

My father built a chest
that held toys. This defined strength:
to make what could contain
toys and the lives of toys
at night, so that I could remove
them from my mind and sleep.

Later I learned
strength was the sensation
one animal feels when it conquers
another. Or the image
of an animal refusing
to be conquered, transforming
herself into a silhouette, erect.

But this was later. The man
at the pet store whose muscles
flexed as he took a mouse
by the tale and whipped its body
against the counter

was later. And the German potter
rising in the dark
to make tea before working
in her cold garden: this was later as well.

First, strength was a chest
that contained what only my mind
had contained — the lives
of toys. It contained
them in this world, beside a television
and stacks of videos and an encyclopedia.
Limbs covered the bottom of the chest.
Heads, guns, legs, belts, screws,
plastic orange ghosts: the chest
contained all this. And the reconstitution
of a figure involved long searches

through it. It contained
even what might no longer be in it,
what I remembered and lost.

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