From the Book of Loss

By Richard Ryal

I have her not because I deserve her but because
fate is indifferent on every battleground
so we who don’t deserve our rewards
collect them anyway
but I’m still smoke too thin to cast a shadow in the sun
and someday she’ll see that

this window mentions the underside of a rowboat
pulled from the canal onto my neighbor’s backyard,
the boat’s owner never tried to protect
the hull’s histories of paint and the canal’s brine
unsettled most of the boat’s aesthetic argument
about red, yellow, blue

the Book of Loss insists, mourn briefly,
new life already filled this void
so keep up, the future arrives relentless
and you keep calling it the present

we need new coins that escape the fatigue
of grasp and release, resist our impulses,
arrive embossed with trees and oceans,
not faces of the famous,
silent in the pocket but singing when spent

I try to erase my shadow with candles in all corners,
mask my reflection with a yellow blindfold,
delete daylight with unnecessary tasks
but I can’t cancel the bully pull of tides and
moon phases, the lean of gravity on my waking eyes,
the rain against my walking