PAD Day 12: Just an Old T-shirt

Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a poem titled "The Art of ______", and (2) write a poem about a dull thing you own, and why you love it. I wrote two poems today on the subject of this particular object, but this is the longer and more successful of the two, I believe - it's in blank verse.

The Art of Losing

The art of losing isn't hard to master...

                                Elizabeth Bishop

My endless catalog: an errant sock,

a birth certificate, a wedding ring -

some trivial and some significant.

I must be careless or disorganized

to lose track of the precious and banal.

But some things simply fade from memory,

and the opposite is true - I hang on

to those that seem of little worth to me

for fear the fog of age will wipe them out

completely. That's why I wear this T-shirt -

Spring Training at the Phillies, Florida,

just seven years ago - my closest friend

and I, a road trip for St. Patrick's Day.

He left by fall; the cancer took him home.

The letters on the shirt are fading out,

and some flaked off, and one arm has a hole,

but wearing it connects me to that spring,

despite the fact that words come harder now,

just like this shirt - with every wash it gets

more difficult to wear, and yes, to read.