lone art

The following was inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” which in some ways feels like a lone loan into herself, or maybe me.

*

The arts of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Spring will wilt first, then creep the newborns,

then the pickled pieces of me in them,

the awful, little, lesser and lessening Kacper.

I knew him once, met him on a pain-painted bench

before all this hoopla of evaporating and the displaced.

He sat still, humming an old song to an empty oyster.

Open, close, cavities cooing the weeping of wounds,

he mused to me that he was okay because he wasn’t.

Shell the shell, he said, before it evolves into something softer.

Something not like him, I guessed, not like me either,

nor like those few who stay with the snow of summer.

Instead sludge, slip into something different altogether.

I never heard what for he had to go to gone.

So, he left. He shut. His hold. He cut. His untold.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.