Weekly Poem: ‘I lost my pen, I lost my keys’

By Marianne Boruch

I lost my pen, I lost my keys,
and my hat somewhere on a table,
the table its room, the field
its horizon, a road like

a dowsing rod bowed low
to remember, emphatic and forked
that stick, two hands to hold
the map that loved the place, spoke it

day or night I lost in a cellar to dark
and dank where sun tried
for one window — very small — and lost,
over a sink whose water never knew

or kept losing the simplest reason
for coming and going, no way
from the blue or the deep
to bring back a cup of it but a flood.

Marianne Boruch is the author of seven collections of poetry, including “The Book of Hours” (Copper Canyon, 2011), two volumes of essays on poetry and a memoir. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at Purdue University, where she developed and directed the MFA program until 2005.