My father is semi-porous. Even now that he's been fully disassembled and the schematics rendered in a dizzying cross-section, he remains largely unknowable to us. Once we spun tops in the shadow of his rocking chair which turned out to be an optical illusion triggered by the elaborate arrangement of pieces of wood that did not resemble a chair whatsoever when gazed at directly, and why why would he do such a thing the same question we asked every time we gauged his charged breath for negative ions not excluding alcoholic ones or caught him slipping sawdust from his pocket into the meringue. Oh, his pocket. Plural: Pocket. Not pockets. Pocket— like deer, like moose. His coinage. I can hear him rage still at those times when, still young, we threw an "s" onto the end; I can see his flaring hair and contorted features dappled with Benday dots like a comic book villain as he came after us. Other than that, an unstinting pacifist mostly occupied with his many pocket. The fatal gift of the multipocketed vest one year started it; we could only watch wide-eyed as his obsession mounted, first with the stashing away of wrapper detritus clip coin oil subsidy paperwork in existing pocket, then the construction of new pocket, pocket stitched lovingly and then stapled hastily and then merely outlined in sharpie, "Home of Future Pocket," unceremonious groundbreaking followed by new pocket springing up like housing, whole subdivisions eventually, Pockettown, the continual fractionation of slottable space, eat your heart out Zeno. Infinite places where things could be lost and found, places where things could stay hidden and accrue scruff, fuzz and legend, places where things could fester, mold, and potentially molt, places a person could go lost for years, the only trace a single rivulet of sardine juice spilling down the smooth side of a shirt they wore but a single time, unless, that is, you count memory.

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(1) Pockets are like subway cars--profoundly democratic, messy, jumbled and crammed. Silver bracelet rubs elbows with snot-fed kleenex and clings to its strap.

(2) I borrowed a friend's coat and then he moved to Florida so it is mine now. But it is pocketless. Sometimes I flail like an infant at the sides as if that might conjure them into being.

(((()))) If the string theorists are right, the universe teems with hidden dimensions; pockets abound. To make even a single new one, then, is to play at being God.