So not so long ago, I lost my keys.
And when you live in a huge city,
this is a crisis of rather enormous proportions,
in part, because one wants, in the city, to get inside.
To no longer have an inside to get to
is a really traumatic thing.
You have only the outside world, which is too much.
And keys lost in the city, are gone.
That's it.
With very few exceptions.
This is called, "No Orpheus."
"Dropped in a midnight taxi's backseat dark.
Slipped through that coat pocket hole
you'd always meant to mend.
Tumbled down a street corner drain into an underworld
where no Orpheus may ever find an exit.
Lose your keys here, and face the sheer, unyielding wall
of irretrievable.
What won't be found again.
400 years in New York City, how many keys
gone head over teeth into the invisible's huge pockets?
Whole bronze reefs, tips and ridges gleaming in the murk.
Atlantean, these brassy, useless shoals.
The rooms they opened, immaterial now.
Doors that swing on no hinges, open to no one's touch,
not even a poet stumbling back from shadow land.
Keys, more of them every blessed night and day, once and always,
gone.
No poetry in that, he thinks or else there's nothing else."
So that's a poem about what one might
do with the inevitable losses, make poems out of them,
make some kind of art or artifact out of them.