There was no art in losing that coin
you gave me for luck—the one with the profile
of an emperor on one side and a palm on the other.

It rode for days in a pocket
of my black pants, the paint-speckled ones,
past storefronts, gas stations and playgrounds,

and then it was gone, as lost as the lost
theorems of Pythagorus, or the Medea by Ovid,
which also slipped through the bars of time,

and as ungraspable as the sin that landed him—
forever out of favor with Augustus—
on a cold rock on the coast of the Black Sea,

where eventually he died, but not before
writing a poem about the fish of those waters,
into which, as we know, he was never transformed,

nor into a flower, a tree, or a stream,
nor into a star like Julius Caesar,
not even into a small bird that could wing it back to Rome.

 = Karen Marek