What am I afraid to lose?

It sits there fat upon the page.

The big fat question I put up:

What are you afraid to lose?

I examine the inventory.

If I lost my sight (what's left of it)

I'd still remember those butterflies

and finches. And sunrises,

moonlight on granite,

the curve of a womanly hip.

Let's just say enough

to fill up thousands of pages.

Hearing? well much the same,

the voice of the Lowell High School choir

singing Amazing Grace (heard it twice)

would still live on in mind's ear.

Smell, must not neglect

citrus orchards in bloom,

coffee brewing, or plumeria,

petrichor (rain on dry earth),

the musk of a lover aroused.

I can summon those too.

What would I create, absent

all those, blind, deaf, and dumb?

If I still had my hands I would make

things from sandpaper and wire,

scraps of silk, glass and fur,

poems made for the fingers.

There would still be the pleasure

of skin to skin friction and pressure,

perhaps more in the absence of all else.

So it would seem that the loss

of the senses would not be the worst,

because I'd still have my mind.

That would be pretty awful to lose,

to live in a world I don't understand

tormented by personal demons.

I don't know, perhaps I could slay them

wielding a broken umbrella like a sword.

What about love, could I live without it?

Probably not, but I trust that I won't,

the times when I don't never last for long.

I'm in love at the drop of a hat.

You might think how callow, how shallow,

but those moments don't fade with the decades.

And each one builds on the last.

However, that would be the greatest loss,

for all the things that I've mentioned

and all those I haven't (too many to mention)

depend on love. The moonlight, the songs

the scent of a lover, those damn butterflies

and gold finches.

If passion for those ebbed,

and there were no person whose eyes

I wanted to drown in, and no one who wanted

to drown in mine? I'd be afraid to lose that.

Here's the best part. I won't.

I've been assured that God loves me,

and you can make up your own mind

about that assertion, but the evidence

is plain to me, nothing ever once given

is truly lost.