Inventory of a Borrowed Coat

In the left pocket, a ticket stub gone soft, the ink dissolved to a gray weather. I cannot read the film, the seat, the year — only that someone sat through the dark and kept the proof of it close to the hip.

The lining frays where a hand once rested, a small geography of repeated thought. Threads loosen the way a name loosens when you say it enough times to a window, until it is only a sound the glass returns.

Wool holds the cold of a hundred mornings, the smell of rain that hasn't fallen yet. I wear the shape of a stranger's shoulders, the slight lean toward a vanished doorway, the way they braced against an old wind.

Somewhere the owner walks bareheaded now, lighter by one coat, one map of pockets, unaware their warmth still circulates through a body that was never theirs, keeping a stranger honest against the season.