Friday, March 15, 2013

Lost


Where is it now, the wallet

he wore in his back pocket,

sent to me from the coroner

in an envelope, all that was returned

from his broken body?



Not t-shirt (cut free

from his still-warm chest.)

Not sock or shoe.



Coveted, my last remnant

of him, the animal skin

I held to my cheek

and inhaled, eyes closed.



Stolen by strangers, every room

of the house tipped askew,

drawers upended, a jumble of despair

through which I raked

in search of anything left behind.



Small solace in knowing everything

we once treasured still exists

in some form — ash, particle,

entombed at the dump.



Did the robbers toss aside

the expired credit cards,

the note to meet a friend

for dinner one day too late?

The fifth-grade school photo of me

he carried for twenty years?

Photos of our sons, still children?


No cash, no checks, value only 

in what thieves never want. 

In what I want back, knowing

there is no coming back from the dead.




8 comments:

  1. Oh dear T; that's all very sad, and very poignant. LOST? I think it should be entitled NIGHTMARE.

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  2. The gift they unknowingly left, are the memories of happier times. Let the pain of that day go with the wallet.

    LLX

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  3. gaw, the loss. over and over again. what little you had left of material things, stolen from you, too. xxoo

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  4. Terrible, terrible, terrible loss. And so poignantly expressed. I wish I had the words to comfort you. Cx

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  5. Grief.

    It never quite leaves home entirely.

    Love, C.

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  6. This is so beautifully, so clearly expressed, I sit here with tightening chest. What a gift when words come to us as the means of escaping what was almost too much to bear. xo

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  7. the hardest part of 'being robbed' is the knowledge that whomever has one's belongings now has no idea of their true value. Having experienced this three times now, I think of these precious things out there somewhere, lost, like sad children crying to be loved again.
    Beautifully expressed T.

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  8. Jacqueline, 3 times?? Good god. That's more than is humanly endurable. Small comfort, then, in the fact of their existence, somewhere.

    xo

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