In which I consider the poem in my pocket

I've always been one of those fellows who needs pockets. Lots of them, and roomy. Cargo pants were invented with me in mind. The carpenter jeans fad of the 70s turned out to be prescient, as the ruler pocket is now ideal for one's mobile phone.

I was that boy whose pockets were always bulging with interesting stones and a key to my grandpap's attic and a cool-looking bottlecap I found there, acorns and an old square iron nail from my cousin's farm and my lucky arrowhead and...all my treasures nestled securely as I toted them around. When something held meaning for me, or merely pleased me by the way it looked or felt, it would take on a talismanic aura, and I would always want it with me. It was comforting and helped me feel connected to the places or people or experiences I associated with these objects. Keeping my little items safe made me feel both protected and capable of protecting something dear.

Now the morning or evening ritual of filling or emptying my pockets involves many items of a far more practical nature rather than a whimsical one. There are still echoes of the little boy's wondering senses in the way I pause to enjoy the heft and texture of my pocket knife*, still the tinge of mystical fascination while I choose a favorite coin** to carry as a worry stone. The pen and mechanical pencil I slip into my shirt pocket are ones that the 8-year-old me would have selected if he'd had a larger allowance, and I enjoy the tactile pleasure of a wallet made of mellow baseball-glove leather***.

But the keys I now carry no longer open the treasure room-cum-museum of Grandpap Cooney's attic, the musty playland where, undisturbed, I could don an itchy Eisenhower jacket and look for titties in the National Geographic. The keys I used today are for keeping people out as much as letting them in, for making things go rather than allowing time to stop. And where before a penny in my pocket was to me a richly textured disc of copper bearing intriguing symbols that hinted at great leaders and vast empires and bold ideas, today what my wallet holds are tokens of obligation, responsibility, conformity. It is stuffed with tatty, ugly, germ- and drug-laden small bills for which I slowly trade my soul and with which I can barely sustain my body. The driver's license that functions as my identification confers not one bit of truth about my identity. And the AAA card tucked in there states that I belong to that organization, but I don't feel any sense of belonging, and touching the plastic card that confers this belonging upon me doesn't make me feel anything at all. It isn't an artifact of me.

I could touch that square nail in my pocket and feel that I belonged somewhere, came from somewhere. Touching it, I could smell the cows' warm exhalations, hear my Aunt Peg talking in Slovak to her pet chicken Veronica as they sat side by side on the sofa watching Walter Cronkite, feel the venom of the wasp that stung my ear beside the pond. Rolling that 200-year-old piece of iron that I'd scavenged from the delapidated carriage house between my fingers, I could hear the echo of the rifle from the woods the afternoon my cousin shot my favorite dog, Lonesome, for killing chickens, even though I tried to tell him that Lonesome had been with me all day and that it was his wealthy wife's horrid, pampered, bug-eyed Boston Terrier that had run down the hill past us with feathers and blood all over its face.

Science tells us that the olfactory sense is the one that calls up our most deeply-buried and evocative memories. Many has been the time, walking past the circulation desk in the library, that I've been seized by a sudden and inexplicable flashback to the heavenly warm aroma of Mrs Engel's fluffy golden egg buns filling the cafeteria of St Robert Bellarmine Elementary. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that the inside of my mother's purse smelled like pennies, gumbands, and Dentyne gum, with a subtle undertone of tobacco and the pre-moistened towelettes that Kentucky Fried Chicken used to provide. So I have no argument with that assertion.

My most powerful sensations, though, are visual and tactile. The world enters me through my eyes and my skin far ahead of the other organs. Sight and touch are how we experience solid objects, and solid objects are the things that both contain and retrieve my memories.

What would happen if I lost one of those things? Those things that bear my memories?

I have. I've lost so many things - in moving house, in chaotic breakups, in the depths of a lake when the canoe tipped, in the mail, in my girlfriend's dog****, in a box of stuff dropped off at Goodwill - things that I had prized and protected. I remember them all, like the beautifully crafted leather pouch that I'd bartered for in exchange for some licorice root***** at a music festival on the first long trip I ever took by myself. That's long gone. Or the small woodcut print of a woman's face that Ginny Acklin gave me after I tried to kiss her but she turned me down. I hope someone somewhere has found it and wondered about it and hung it on their wall. My dysfunctional horses Rosebud and Spirit, the former a perpetually pissed-off equine Jeep, the latter a singularly gorgeous leopard Appaloosa who was too terrified to venture more than 100 yards from the barn (he came around eventually, after lots of unconditional patience and a lot of my walking home through the woods without my shoes). I lost my horses and my brilliant three-legged dog and I tried to die.

And I lost my mother.

And I lost the little boy with the pockets full of treasure.

And I may lose a woman I was born to love.

Loss terrifies me to the marrow of my bones. The nucleus of every cell shrivels and hides at the merest hint of it. It is unbearable. Unbearable, and inescapable. I've fought against it since forever, to utter exhaustion, even though no one has ever won that battle or ever will.

One day Elizabeth Bishop saved me. She confronted me, poked me in the chest, asked me, What if it didn't have to be a battle? Can the meaning, the truth, of the lost thing itself be replaced by the meaning and truth of the memory of the thing?

It seemed worth a try. Now I carry this poem in my indestructible wallet, in my snug pocket, along with my other talismans and dully useful objects. I would hate to lose my knife, or my keys, or my cash. I'm certain I couldn't bear losing my beloved. But I know I'll never lose this perfect poem, because at long last I am beginning to understand it and perhaps, someday, I'll learn how to live it.

*Schatt & Morgan Series XVIII bare-end English jack
**presently the marvelously hefty 1985 $100 Mexican peso with Venustiano Carranza obverse
***J. Peterman. No, really.
****18th century family heirloom nativity set
*****Glycyrrhiza glabra
_______

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

- Elizabeth Bishop