Lost Looking for Lost

A Folktale Week Adventure

Nov 12, 2023

Today’s Poem:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Lost, Looking

Lost 
looking for 
you. Am I 
looking for 
you, still? 
Or am I 
looking for 
me?

12 November 2023
No. 162

Lost Looking for Lost, journaling, first.

Since April of this year, I start my day writing a poem. I am not a poet. But if someone else told me they write a poem every day surely I would say, “You are a poet then. Good, bad, no matter. A poet poems.” So why, when it is me, all this is and isn’ting?

I am struggling with Folktale Week* work for tomorrow. It used to be a good deadline got me motivated to finish just in time — with that line at my nose. And since the line is tomorrow, perhaps I am still on course. But lost, well, is lost.

So here I sit, cold (broken heater, temps just leaving freezing), tangled, curled up and tense, in search of lost.

It began here:

Lost was a small foldable magnifying glass that Søren found when helping my dad clean the house he’d lived in since I was in 6^th grade, in preparation for moving. The magnifying glass belonged to my grandmother, my Memom, dead now, for 23 years. So, this first lost was an object found. We didn’t even know it was lost. Had she mentioned it to my dad, to me? “Richard?” I hear her say, still, “have you seen my magnifying glass, the one with the little leather case? It was Mother’s.” Perhaps he helped her look for it for days and, not finding it, bought her a new one. Or maybe he tuned her out, having teenagers in the house, a business, who has time for such a small, lost thing? And when Søren found it, did any memory haunt my dad? A flurry of familiarity dissipating as quickly as the spores of a puffball mushroom but with less to hold onto, with less to catch. Could he have remembered to remember? Could he have heard that long ago voice ask, “Richard, have you…” For now, there was cleaning, and moving house. Who has time for such a small, found thing? Has he now forgotten twice about something lost once?

But then, as this was brewing, a more ambiguous lost arose. The losing of my Mother, whom I never referred to as Mother until she died. Not the losing of a magnifying glass (if she ever had one,) or her painting of her chicken, (which was found), or her orange bandana, (which I’ve worn to shreds), but my Mother, my mom, my Pip, the person. Lost, as well, before she died. I can hear her voice, still “Margaux, something’s not right,” she said, of the not remembering. Was I listening? As my mom grew more lost, we grew more distant. We worked well together, making the distance between us grow and stretch like street taffy, and it became impossible to traverse. We became strangers. And two years after her death, two years into my trying to make sense of the end of her life and its distance from the middle of mine, I discovered that I have two APOe4 genes — this discovery came with a warning. I investigated. And I started to find her a little, but began losing myself in all the looking.

As for Folktale week, I have a poem for each word. Some begin and remain small — tiny sparks. Others begin as a cloud that I distill, until I am left with everything and nothing all at once. I don’t have a system today, this final day before Folktale Week. I just have this morning with its miraculous melancholic light. The light brings clarity to seeing – actually, physically seeing, somehow.

So now, I’ll get to it, beginning with continuing to non-dominant hand draw my mom as a child and I shall see where she takes me.