Soldiers Despite Ourselves
Downstairs a trumpeter is playing Gershwin badly but somehow truer that way. The squat chimney of my pipe keeps offering smoke-signals to the moon. the sea-waves glitter like a zillion nickels... Two wars ago the battle of the Riviera happened here. Two wars ago the author of The Little Prince flew southward from this coast and crashed at sea without a trace. That's how I tell the time these days—by wars, the madness of wars. I think of Mussolini who believed each generation needed war to purify its blood. He leaned on history to show that life's unlivable except through death. I palm the ashes from my pipe. To hell with Mussolini. I'll take bad Gershwin to a bullet any time. To hell with history. The moon's manna on the sea outshines the glory that was Greece. To hell with those who say the earth's a battleground we're doomed to govern with a gun. Because of them we have to fight to live. But win or lose, they've won since fighting proves they're right. Why ask if they outnumber us or not? It just takes one.
Losers Keepers
It could be paltry as a pipe, a pen, a single sock... Or sacred as a ring, a book inscribed by Maritain in French... Or anything made yours by purchase, luck of preference, then lost somehow somewhere beyond retrieval. Suddenly you wake to find the customarily misplaced transformed into the definitely missing. Slowly you retrace your steps. You make allowance for the inconceivable— "No one would leave a wallet in a microwave, but still I'll check." At last you're narrowed to accept the obvious while hoping like a jilted lover for a totally surprising reconciliation in the end. Meanwhile you burn, you damn, you smoulder. Later you realize you've gained through loss all sense of gratitude you lost by having. You wonder then if everything deserves misplacement once to prove how irreplaceable it is and how it's always found anew in the remembering. All this occurs to you one mortal evening while you're seeking one lost thing made infinitely dearer for the losing. A mirror traps you as you search, and suddenly you're face to face with someone destined to be found among the many waiting, waiting to be lost.
