Stephen Massimilla
LOST QUEST
“The search for wholeness involves many detours…”
—Jung
You’ve gotten sidetracked only to find
yourself in this last huge used bookstore—
one almost swallowed by the pandemic—
searching for your homeland
with an app on the blink: your flashlight.
Maybe your love
of returning is still pressed between pages
where you could examine your own dream
as you would a fetus or Galapagos lizard.
Maybe you’re alone
with buried, surviving wishes, fears, hisses: A pipe
knocks inside the wall like a metal heart.
Among your oldest visions, among the many
volumes of weight and promise: the Ashkenazi ghosts
still nestled in behind your back. Even a god
can’t be forgiven
for devouring so many lives. But the sense of shouting
comes from nowhere, just from print.
And look, right at your fingertips:
pages and pages of unmarked scars in the landscape,
or still (with hope?) freezing teens and spaniels
buried in the snow.
There was nothing to eat, no one else to care,
nothing but melted (thank God for) air.
Your grandmother was herself a teen
who unburied herself, escaped. There was an arbitrary
bridge, tiny fragments of flags. In this cold life, why
have sisters, children, people? Back in that flattened
Polish town, a thousand years of relatives are gone.
Where you yourself were and are
must still matter now: Waking barefoot, famished,
heading back toward the icebox,
but not to look inside, maybe you’ll find
what you’re really living for.
Stephen Massimilla is a poet, painter, professor, photographer, and author of several books. His multi-genre Cooking with the Muse (Tupelo Press, 2016) won the Eric Hoffer Award and many others. His newest poetry collections, Frank Dark (Barrow Street Press, 2022) and Stronger than Fear: Poems of Social Justice, are forthcoming.