by Santino DallaVecchia
& Keanu says I know that the ones who love us will miss us, I catch myself
mourning my living parents again. & though the brain holds its mysteries close,
I catch myself wishing it’d flash me its hand, because how could it not know?
Someone has to know & why not the brain. Even as a kid I knew my parents
didn’t know. I know I don’t know. & if even Keanu doesn’t know, who’s to say
the lost voice of a lost boy running down the brain’s strange wrinkled highways
isn’t the oracle we’ve been looking for. Do you remember Reepicheep (of course you do,
Mom, you read us his story so tenderly & returned to him your whole life after in metaphor),
the valiant mouse from Narnia who set out in his coracle to find the world beyond the world?
In the end I don’t want C.S. Lewis’ answer, but I’d take something like Reepicheep’s. I’d take
something like memory, working in both directions, until time metastasizes into a new organ,
pumping & beating us all together again. Converging all the waters until our oracles pronounced
us all together again, & there I go, mourning the living. It’s like I can’t not pretend that the fire
needs wood, when relax, it’s only a cold spring & it’s burning fine. But if it’s all already
happened, Mom, Dad, if I’ve lost you & only buried truths past all liquid & neural pathways
know where you’ve gone, then I have to miss you now. I have to get a heard start.
I have to miss you enough that you’ll be able to find me when I become the lost voice,
the mouse in the coracle. Because if time moves in more ways than forward,
our loved ones who’ve died, who we’ve missed, stand the risk of missing us on our journey
into the final dark. It all becomes so chancy when you put time in an equation with the void
& I don’t want to be lost forever. I don’t want to be missed as my little boat passes by.
I want my Dad to want to watch an action movie with us. I want my Mom to tell me a story.
I want Keanu Reeves to be around, somewhere, living happily in death. I want them to find me,
a fire thought finished guttering back into the night, my missing the light that guides us all home.
Santino DallaVecchia is a poet & educator from Michigan. A graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, Santino's work has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Crab Fat Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Dream Pop Press, & Yes, Poetry, among others.