The Whole of Harmonium
That’s what Stevens wanted to call his collected poems.
He lost that battle. And so what chance do any of us
have? We’re all losing things constantly as a kind of
completeness. Eliot, eight, lost a pencil topper, a Martian
with google eyes, at the Omaha Botanical Gardens.
That was a bad afternoon, the “lost forever” lesson. It’s
Lesson One. And today, at the Binghamton airport, an
airport I’ve decided does no one any real good, I lost
$1.75 in a snack machine trying to get a peppermint
patty. It fell and then bounced back onto the bottom
merchandise shelf. I meditated upon this a bit, hopefully
$1.75 worth, trying to make it a worthwhile learning
experience, as I have no more change, and there’s
nowhere around I can see to get any. How my small losing
will be this boon for someone who will get two treats
in a bit, that I might, that I could perhaps wait around
and watch happen. Maybe “$1.75 worth” would make
a good mantra. It kind of trips off the tongue. I’m
participating in “forward thinking” while the two people
in the seats in front of me are getting to know each other.
He’s telling her he’s published several books with major
vendors on conflict resolution in the workplace. It’s
making me want to test him out. He nods a lot and holds
his hands together like he’s praying while he talks. I’m
losing something every second, listening to him. Like
how every few years someone proclaims it to be the “End
of Innocence,” which then must mean innocence
somehow comes back to us, to be lost over and over,
or that perhaps it’s innocence in layers, all the way down
to never arriving, while bankers are still mysteriously dying
and no one’s saying much about it. Or else no more than
a statistical average of bankers is dying mysteriously and
slow news days are making too much of it. They say,
likewise, that the Maryville, Missouri area has the statistical
average of cancers and tumors and people dying per
capita, but people are saying something here is killing us.