IN THE POEM “A Suit or a Suitcase,” Maggie Smith writes about the body at the end of life. Do we wear the body, or does it carry us? What if what I think of as me were distributed everywhere in that body, thoughts and feelings and the sense of self in the hands and feet as much as the head and chest? “Ideas are whispering in my wrists / and all along the slopes of my calves,” one stanza goes. What if we were equally present in all of those moving parts? What would they tell us about what we miss when we don’t acknowledge them?
