Lost

Last week upon the ice-slick stones that gently arc their frozen way to my auto’s home I slipped, but did not fall. All is melting now, and clutches at my feet in sucking patches of mud and water slurry, parcel of a spurious spring, premature and sudden in the moment. When all this has with the weather stopped and frozen once again, so that even my breath upon the frosted air floats in frigid billows before the mouth and lungs that gave them birth, I will struggle with early finalities and missing goodbyes and plans made, and chances in time that seemed possible and real but were as evanescent as the thin breath-born fog about my head.

Birds sing and squirrels energized by melting snow upon the pine boughs leap and do not fall, miraculous rodent acrobats that dance aloft and then descend in frantic search of food buried in a yielding earth, boon to life, fecund treasures wrested free by tiny claws on dirty fingers, eager hungry mouths in rhythm with the unexpected warmth, and they shall scramble to live another day.

In tandem with their desperate edict I search to find and hold the laughter and the song of our fallen missing brother. I strain against the impossible strength of bonds that tie him far from us and always, and cannot claim a sense of what cannot be the finality of a once and future bound together, trapped by a mournful hall I cannot locate, lurching in a moribund dance which title I cannot remember; but should you chance to find me there, leaning sad against a wall, reach out and spirit me away, and use the name that people used to hail me by, which I recall was…