Lost It

One of her gifts was a poem that I thought was written only for me,

once,

on this scrap of paper that had been previously printed

with news about the paper folding workshop she’d attended

where she’d learned to fold the brochure from the exhibition,

another.

I’d planned to read again, and not understand, again, her poem

but let some words haunt me as I placed it in her folded paper art

which I would set on a pedestal with the ticket to the symphony

with my mentor for love and niceness, my mother-in-law,

demented,

and my husband and I would look at this work on our mantel

admiring the choices of fold points, sentences broken, knowing

already

what the curator had written about the artist that flowed

out like prose. My friend’s folds disrupt the artspeak,

so smart.

We set a very round rock from the yard, saved

for its circularity, at the foot of the metal base holding

the folded paper art, that holds the poem.

A volcano erupts and covers vast areas of the Front Range,

mud from the Platte River Valley fills our home

in a thousandth of a second and we are extinct.

A millennium later we’re discovered,

the button of my jeans all the remains of me.

The metal pedestal, the rock and the metallic

ink used to write the poem remain.

 

Lost the poem

before I could read it a second time.