Lost!

I've always known this to be true, and yet here it is, in my face once more.  You give yourself over to organization for a day, a week, ten days; and the house is lighter, and your spirits lift, and then you reach for the one thing you need -- in order to complete the ONE IMPORTANT ITEM on today's To Do list -- and the damned thing is gone.

Not gone-gone,
as in you took care of it
and therefore can stop thinking. Gone is
precisely what it is not. Gone-ish
is precisely what it is.
doing you no good, because it's not the what
that's in question but the where.

Where?  Here, a moment ago.
Here, in my hands. I carried it
into this room to place an address label
or stuff a photograph into the envelope
or a twenty dollar bill.

Of all the wheres it might be, here is where
it is not.  The remainder of the afternoon,
crafted around tasks intended to follow
the placing and stuffing, has drizzled its way
to some other lame pursuit, the pursuit of that
which once was here, where it belonged,
before this tidied order was created.

The errands, and I, are at a standstill,
derailed by early success.