Last Loss

“The music in my head,” I said,
“I'll miss the most,” counting my other losses
the way an undertaker counts the dead.
Each obstacle I come across is

about the same, about my pain,
while all the wonderful freak accidents
where love is fluid as a whooping crane
swerve through my mind, their radiance

immeasurable. Yet they, too, fade,
these melodies crowding my brain. Like sin
they are forgiven, even as they're made,
are doors to rooms too dark to wander in.

*John Gery is a poet and a critic of modern and contemporary poetry, as well as collaborative translator of poetry. He has taught at the University of Iowa and since 1990 he has served as the founding Director of the Ezra Pound Center for Literature at Brunnenburg, Italy. John's poetry, criticism, and reviews have appeared in literary and academic journals throughout the country, as well as in Europe, including Contemporary Literature, Dark Horse, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Paris Review, Southwest Review, and Verse. For his work, he has received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991-92), an Artist Fellowship from the Louisiana Division of the Arts (2002), two Deep South Writers Poetry Awards (1983, 1987), and a European Award of the Circle Franz Kafka in Prague (2000), among other awards. His collection of poems, The Enemies of Leisure, received a Critic's Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books.