Poetry

Spring 2008

 

 

Philip Miller

The Logic of Loss

There it is, the thing lost, found again
in the very cranny I first refused
to look, so sure my logic was
that it was in another nook,

where it belonged, the key, I mean,
in the key drawer with a dozen more
of brass, aluminum, miniatures for trunks,
skate key, clock key, rusty skeleton,

the obsolete set to the Ford LTD
in the scrapheap now or compressed,
reused for some new-fangled guzzler
(but I digress); to find it, I gave up

looking; then there it was, that key
to the lock box where I knew
the snapshot of my once-intended lay
along with some other old friends'

and lovers' fading Kodachromes
and curled-up black-and-whites.
I find it in that very spot
I recollect I chose myself,

the self, so easily deluded, that told
its self that it was a special place,
never to be forgotten. I can see
myself slip the key into the striped

Russell Stover's box, still filled
with small brown wrappers
that once held fine chocolates.
I swear I still smell the sweetness

of their caramels and creams
I tasted when I was a little boy
on some long lost afternoon,
suddenly brought back,

resurrected by a tipsy causal chain
to spring forward in the mind,
momentarily, reconstitute,
then recede, fading into specks

until there it was, the thing found,
lost again, the key to my first love mislaid
by the illogic of the brain inside
the nooks and crannies of my heart.

 

In the Back of My Mind

I still dream of my father as one does,
thinking him still alive, then remembering
as I watch him disappear out a door,
waving, dissolving, waking me up.

He's always in the back of my mind,
but in a few short years, I'll be older
than he ever was, ever will be,
though he'll live as long as I have a mind.

Yet the longer I live, the younger he grows.
Once he was older than I would ever be
until he left the world — as they call it —
to live in the back of my mind.

And some days he weeps, some days he roars,
growing wilder as I grow wiser — warier anyway.
Imagine, if we ever meet again, Father and Son,
neither of us knowing which one we are.

 

 

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