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    The Whole of Harmonium

     

    by John Gallaher

     

     

    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.

     

     

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