The art of Losing Isn't Hard to Master
So many things seemed filled with the intent to be lost, their loss is no disaster. Lose something everyday. This is the commandment I live by. I lose sleep, places and names, papers and keys, people who live just outside of my circle but in a radius of two blocks, experiences to be written up and down, thoughts, hours, and even whole days. I lost an earring last night. Dangling like a life saver, it was new and lovely. It’s somewhere on a suite’s dance floor. Or it’s at a bar. Or I might have dropped it on the pavement, and it’s maybe under the snow.
It snowed last night. World is suddener than we fancy it. “Look,” someone said. White sheets fell through the window framing three in the morning. We went up to the roof and twirled around swirling flakes. Screaming with the ecstasy of the first snow that’s melting this morning that I didn’t wake up for. More hours lost. Or found for resting, dreaming, revealing secret angles of the interior.
I thought I lost something else this week. Something I thought couldn’t be lost. A force forseen to last forever. But I’m forswore. It didn’t. In the universe, the conservation of energy only means that the world is going to room temperature. Matter dropped out of the hot air balloon and without ballast, I rise, lighter, free to see a larger picture. The weight, take a load off Fanny, is gone. This is the tragedy they don’t prepare you for in poems. Except the Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’s “come live with me and be my love” that “if all the world and love were young,” and “had joys no date nor age no need.” Because it does. The true tragedy is sadder than the far greater example of unrequited Gaspara Stampa. A blank where there used to be something that thought it was eternal, that promised immortality.
It snowed last night. World is suddener than we fancy it. “Look,” someone said. White sheets fell through the window framing three in the morning. We went up to the roof and twirled around swirling flakes. Screaming with the ecstasy of the first snow that’s melting this morning that I didn’t wake up for. More hours lost. Or found for resting, dreaming, revealing secret angles of the interior.
I thought I lost something else this week. Something I thought couldn’t be lost. A force forseen to last forever. But I’m forswore. It didn’t. In the universe, the conservation of energy only means that the world is going to room temperature. Matter dropped out of the hot air balloon and without ballast, I rise, lighter, free to see a larger picture. The weight, take a load off Fanny, is gone. This is the tragedy they don’t prepare you for in poems. Except the Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’s “come live with me and be my love” that “if all the world and love were young,” and “had joys no date nor age no need.” Because it does. The true tragedy is sadder than the far greater example of unrequited Gaspara Stampa. A blank where there used to be something that thought it was eternal, that promised immortality.
