On the General Being of Lostness

Lostness is the You Are Here, the red star

that the mall map linked to GPS.

As if you’d stared into your nowhere

like a sun and photoreceptors

compensated with a point.

Lostness is an immaculately well-dressed

person or a room laid out like charcuterie.

It’s a feeling someone loves you after

a ten-minute talk. Oh yes, but lostness

is loving someone too, knowing you would

take the raft out further if it meant

a few more minutes. Sometimes,

I want to tell my dog that I’m the only one

in the world who knows her whereabouts

and that’s lostness but it’s lived in.

It isn’t sadness. Lostness is the job I had

in ’98 in a warehouse unpacking chic decor

where I began to unravel and unmake

the very things the company was selling.

It was the boxes I moved forward

on the shelves until they lined up well,

pop choruses that played again for the beautiful

and found. It’s almost gladness. It’s the walk

I took one day trying to decide should I live in Montreal?

and thinking that I knew something to make it plain.

Lostness is the many rains of money

that I once watched from an open window.

It’s long been here. It was the semilunate carpal

flowering in late-Cretaceous bones

where everything was going then never more unclear.

It was the first prokaryote closing off its little O

and all that it could be instead.

But lostness is a steady wage. I remember

when my grandfather would come home

from the squats and thousand double checks

of electrical work and wash his hands:

all the dirt moved in his laundry sink

like garter snakes that turned up under stones,

a living current so bearable in its lostness

that I could know it, only, for a hundred years

and still be happy. Lostness was the school

I went to where leaving crumbs on rectangles of paper

meant showing the way someone would have to come.

It was having your knapsack up on the table

like a personal flotation device. It wouldn’t be wrong

to say that lostness is always there on the lip of everything,

like lichen or a bomb. There is a loving lostness

that if you look deep into, you see a great

balance beam that everything

that was, or is, or that may be, is standing on.