Returns

This poem is a tribute to lost things and a place my heart calls home.

 

In Fear of Being Caught Unprepared

What happens to the poems we lose

while out on a wind-chilled cruise of Lake Michigan,

when no notebook makes itself available

tucked between novelties on matronly gift-shop shelves,

and we are stuck clinging to the tassels of a thought

that refuses to wait patiently

while we search our pockets for a pen?

Do they fade away in the sun,

or float, ever-so-leisurely, out of orbit,

like an impregnable helium balloon?

Perhaps lost poems simply turn transparent,

hung around us like hats on invisible coat-hooks,

forgotten by so many dinner guests.

 

Unwritten, a poem is like a cairn

built of lake-smooth rocks and left on some stretch of shoreline,

marking one’s journey around an island.

Stacked lovingly,

the cairn stands, a testament to your being

alive and here,

but some morning not too long after,

a storm returns the stones to their home

where they rest, waiting to be made

a part of something new.