These are the things I have not lost

"Smile a little to yourself for what you have not lost." - Cyril Wong, "What we are given"

"Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit." - Virgil, "The Aeneid"

"You lose more of yourself than you redeem, doing
the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.
When they make the circle wide, it's time to
swim out on your own." - Seamus Heaney, "Station Island"

"Lose something everyday." - Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art"


These are the things I have not lost,
the things that tether me -- or cocoon me -- or
I would simply dissolve.
These are the things that keep me lucid
in the midst of loss.

The sun's brittle light, harsh and urgent,
that lures me back to where I am, who I am
and reminds me that night fades into day --
the unchanging pattern of the hours that holds
all things, lost and unlost, together.

It is the memory of places and the place of memory --
Mont Royal, Pasir Ris, Whitsunday Island --
the sense of folding and unfolding ourselves
into these places, the graceful, deceptive art of
origami in my mind.

And it is your voice, your wholeness
that holds me, keeps me, dissolves into me
or else I could not grow, you whom I have
not lost, although perhaps you
have lost even more than I.

These things I have not lost. I will
give thanks for what I have and what I
do not have. And I will give thanks
for who I am, and for who
I am not and can never be.

6 November 2006