The Stick
The child loves to go to the park
and pick up sticks.
Like a dog,
he will try to bring an impossibly long stick home,
but he is 4 and by 4 o’clock he is getting tired.
He will not let go of one end
but drags it, tottering to the waiting car,
by the time he gets to the lot
he is actually sleepwalking.
I wake up;
a wandering hermit crab slips back into its shell.
That stick I had to abandon was a prototype,
a totem, a measure
of the many things I have had to let go of.
That kind of midnight dancing
is a stick that never ends.
Loss is often only trivial
a vexation,
just something left behind we thought to keep,
then maybe it’s an actual life
that once drained through our hands.
Whatever that stick represents
perhaps like me,
you still want to take an impossible thing home.
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