What little I know, I hold closer, more dear, especially now that I take the daily reinvention of loss as my teacher. I will never graduate from this college, whose M.A. translates “Master of Absence,” with a subtext in the imperative: Misplace Anything. If there’s anything I want, it’s that more people I love join the search party. You were once renowned among friends for your luck in retrieving from the wayside the perfect bowl for the kitchen, or a hand carved deer, a pencil drawn portrait of a young girl whose brimming innocence still makes me ache. Now the daily litany of common losses goes like this: Do you have your wallet, keys, glasses, gloves, giraffe? Oh dear, I forgot my giraffe—that’s the preferred response, but no: it’s usually the glasses, the gloves, the wallet. The keys I’ve hidden. I’ve signed you up for “safe return” with a medallion (like a diploma) on a chain about your neck. Okay, today, this writing, I’m amused by the art of losing. I bow to Elizabeth Bishop, I try “losing faster”—but when I get frantic, when I’ve lost my composure, my nerve, my patience, my compassion, I have only what little I know to save me. Here’s what I know: it’s not absence I fear, but anonymity. I remember taking a deep breath, stopped in my tracks. I’d been looking for an important document I had myself misplaced; high and low, no luck yet. I was “beside myself,” so there may have indeed been my double running the search party. “Stop,” you said gently. “I’ll go get Margaret. She’ll know where it is.” “But I’m Margaret,” I wailed. “No, no.” You held out before me a copy of one of my books, pointing to the author’s photograph, someone serious and composed. “You know her. Margaret Gibson, the poet.” We looked into each others’ eyes a long time. The earth tilted on its axis, and what we were looking for, each other and ourselves, took the tilt, and we slid into each others’ arms, holding on for dear life, holding on.
Copyright © 2014 by Margaret Gibson. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on March 18, 2014. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
Ciconia ciconia
Such jazzy arrhythmia, the white storks' Plosive and gorgeous leave-takings suggest Oracular utterance where the blurred Danube disperses its silts. Then the red- Billed, red-legged creatures begin to spiral, To float among thermals like the souls, wrote Pythagoras, praising the expansive Grandeur of black-tipped wings, of dead poets. Most Eastern cultures would not allow them To be struck, not with slung stone or arrow Or, later, lead bullet— birds who have learned, While living, to keep their songs to themselves, Who return to nests used for centuries, Nests built on rooftops, haystacks, telegraph Poles, on wooden wagon wheels placed on cold Chimneys by peasants who hoped to draw down Upon plague-struck villages such winged luck. If the body in its failure remains A nest, if the soul chooses to return… Yet not one stork has been born in Britain Since 1416, the last nest renounced When Julian of Norwich, anchoress, Having exhausted all revelations, Took earthly dispensation, that final Stork assuring, even while vanishing, "Sin is behovely, but all shall be well."
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Waters. Reprinted from Gospel Night with the permission of BOA Editions.