HAVE YOU SEEN PRECIOUS?

A rain blurred sign says HAVE YOU SEEN PRECIOUS?

the image of the kitten long obscured in pools of bleeding 

ink. I walk past three more copies tacked to three more 

telephone poles, all of them ravaged by rain. Precious was last seen

in October. It is now April, the season for tending,

and I’ve decided to deal with myself. So I’m climbing carpeted stairs

to somewhere I’ve never been, a little office off Arbutus.

A green sign tells me to take off my shoes and I am ashamed

of the smell. A whole winter’s leaking is alive in the lining. 

I have the sniffles.

The therapist is kind like the website promised. Her lips are precisely

pink. She asks why I keep looking at my hands. What is the most efficient

way to say this: They are something that I am sure of. I hope she can tell

this is hard for me. I tell her that it’s hard being beautiful, what it has done

to men and to my mother. And I speak fondly of my pain, 

that precious weapon, how I feel that I am weak and have little else

to wield. I am relieved to hear my symptoms are very common

for girls like me. Eventually she has to say, would you like me to charge 

the card on file? I take her advice: I shall create a vocabulary 

for the things I see and feel.

I go to the grocery store to buy fish and oranges, an $8.50 bag 

of squash soup. It is still morning and the bell peppers are untouched

in their even rows. I’ve spent the early hours thinking of myself

as a daughter and a lover, a victim and a bitch. How peaceful 

to now just be a woman buying groceries, and naming the things 

that are certain: There is the cashier giving me the paper bag, 

there are my hands clasped beneath it. I walk home like an old lady, 

slowly and alone, admiring the patience

of some stranger who despite all the morning’s mist has their laundry 

pinned on a taut wire. There is the congregation of old men 

outside the McDonald’s with their coffee cups and simple wisdoms, great men 

of the world, who have long quit searching for things that cannot be remembered 

during a cigarette, or read in the morning’s paper, who have finished grieving 

all of the things that were precious and lost. Two more things I know: 

There is a fallen nest beneath a tree, pathetically empty, a waste of weaving. 

And there is a toddler who climbs the steps to his porch on all fours.