How Conventional is Loss?

[Jimmy O'Connell]

How Conventional is Loss ?

I
This
is a recurring memory, an image seared to fossil:
the classroom brown-tanned parquet floor
ripples in a cheerless sun dance
below a June cloud of puffled blue sky.

Then,
at lunch break,
I will, for the last time, make a dash
for the penny Kinner and,
if I’m lucky, another penny will
buy me a Johnson, Mooney & O’Brien
pink meringue that will crumble in soft slivers
of succulent tinglings onto the wings of my tongue.

And later,
as dusk washes a grey gloam over pebble-dashed houses,
we play our last game of football on the roundabout;
kicking a burst soccer ball that we
squash into a rugby half-moon and toss
from one unpracticed hand to another.

And tomorrow
Sean and Maurice, and Tom
and Noel, and John and Richard will nod their
polite adult chaperoned goodbyes --
not one of us able to name
what was numbed by separation,
the primal tearing of a child’s seamless summer.


II
I had lived in humid shirt-clinging summers
and worked winters of continuous
six inch snows, began a life where
Dual-Carriageways gave way to continent-
stretching Inter-State Highways;


a landscape where Sears and K-Mart stores
are enclosed in air-conditioned villages,
before I saw how my childhood had fractured
into a loss that burrowed through
seams of blank forgetfulness.

But I fear now I may never rediscover
the simple definitions which marked
my borders and protected the leechings of
identity; for I am becoming again my loss
mined from the deeper lodes of memory.


III
And I need to mine this secret pit, pick into shafts of
the undramatic, load wagons full with the dull
routine of normality, but am compelled
to leave pre-Cambrian memories undisturbed,
fearing retrieval might transform

them into something precious only to those
who assent in silent appreciation of the ordinary,
and can name it as enriching.
Because here, in a place where
alleyways have become refuse dumps

for discarded needles, .38 handguns, the dried
brown blood shed in a drive-by-shooting,
where a three year old can be killed during a
botched burglary, my excavations seem callously
naive. There are other childhoods spilled out

and shattered because some grotesque weight
of pain plunges the good deed, the heroic
moment, into a sump hole of despair.
Whatever was loving and playful, even though
fractured, the sweet meringue, the tussles

and tackles of play during the sun’s sleeping hour,
festers here. The confused last
handshake between boys politely mimicking
the conventions of loss has ossified into
a heart retch of a scream into absurdity.

[JiminyC]

The writing is beautiful Jimmy, an overwhelming addition; and "lodes" is a word I've now added to my vocab, thanks to you.
James.