LOST & FOUND
Closing time, the bartender checks
for items left behind (Rayban
shades...once a black runner’s bra).
He gathers glasses with their dregs,
brooding, a poet, on how to describe
the beer-tang, dark-wood-smell of the place
which he knows will ripen once the sun
breathes on the louvers, wanting in.
The smell’s like the ghost of an ongoing sound,
like the tang and sway of back-up singers
humming after the music’s connivings
have dimmed. He feels invited now
to judge his life’s improbable risks:
keys in hand he’s thinking damn
at the run of his inventory of loss,
enduring a shuffle of inward snapshots:
lovers, friends, now distant or gone,
and no reprieve. The bar seems huge
and he’s approaching something huge,
a place for the lost & found.
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