9.13.15

This poem is the last entry in Philip Levine's chapbook Ashes. I made a note after it "what a way to deal with nostalgia", but now I think a better description is "what a way to look at the unknown".  This is Lost and Found:


A light wind beyond the window,
and the trees swimming
in the golden morning air.
Last night for hours I thought
of a boy lost in a huge city,
a boy in search of someone
lost and not returning. I thought
how long it takes to believe
the simple facts of our lives--
that certain losses are final,
death is one, childhood another.
It was dark and the house creaked
as though we'd set sail for
a port beyond the darkness.
I must have dozed in my chair
and wakened to see the dim shapes
of orange tree and fig against
a sky turned gray, and a few
doves were moaning from the garden.
The night that seemed so final
had ended, and this dawn becoming
day was changing moment
by moment--for now there
was blue above, and the tall grass
was streaked and blowing, the quail
barked from their hidden nests.
Why give up anything? Someone
is always coming home, turning
a final corner to behold the house
that had grown huge in absence
now dull and shrunken, but the place
where he had come of age, still
dear and like no other. I have
come home from being lost,
home to a name I could accept,
a face that saw all I saw
and broke in a dark room against
a wall that heard all my secrets
and gave nothing back. Now he
is home, the one I searched for.
He is beside me as he always
was, a light spirit that brings
me luck and listens when I speak.
The day is here, and it will last
forever or until the sun fails
and the birds are once again
hidden and moaning, but for now
the lost are found. The sun
has cleared the trees, the wind
risen, and we, father and child
hand in hand, the living and
the dead, are entering the world.




The work keeps moving between sentences/verses via enjambment. The sentence may end in the middle of a verse, but the next one continues over the gap. Lost and found to me is a continuum in this context, rather than two states of being, but the vacillation between the two states until they reach equilibrium. I like what this means for us, that as we are in the present, it is merely a passing state but that the past and future will be as well.