WHEN I LOSE THE ENVELOPE OF WHAT MATTERS

by Lyn Lifshin

those Black Sparrow postcards,
then the card from Bill Press.
How he showed my Black
Sparrow books on cable
TV and I knew I had the
publisher of my dreams,
for a bit. You can’t hold anything
long. The love notes from men
who wrote poem after poem
about me after an hour over coffee.
The one who cared for the hunt
and always, because he had
not caught me, longed to take me
down. Poems, good ones, lost
now. In some landfill, or archives
by mistake. For months, the house,
chaos, but this envelope, safe in a
file with less exciting things
that mattered. But then, like for the
moment we had that seemed
right, seemed they could be, just
space from what’s truly gone


*Lyn's website: http://www.lynlifshin.com/books.htm