Opus Number Something – On Gratitude

I was this many years old when I learned what an opus number
means, how chronological order is not always set by composers,
but by scholars, historians, and academics. And having looked 
up the word, as I am wont to do, having taken the head-first swan 
dive into another high tide, I recognize, while my biography intersects 
with that ocean of wisdom and tome (and an absurd amount of hubris)—

sand-blasted, decoupaged, in pages of small print and rhetoric, 
shellacked, another tabula rasa mind eager to seal it all in early 
enough to still remember when later, it is needed most—I admit 
to having caused a bit of (good?) trouble in my adult years, and like
all great and terrible figures of yore, some of whom I read about, 
managed to get thrown out of a college. And yes, that brought with it

unneeded suffering, and yes, I still wear those heavy-hearted cover-ups,
gauze and white and lacy, and while a bit warmer and prettier, are not very
cozy. But I do have my favorite purple slippers, the ones with the waves 
and planets, shaped like little surfboards, ridiculous looking, cheap, big,
but lovely in their own eccentricity—and plus, they do the job. And when 
I finally settle down to read the modern thinkers, or reexamine the classics, 

I am cognizant that with only one tremendously bad and possible exception, 
I got what I sought from education—not the equivalent of paying the bills 
(that would have been nice, too)—but the introduction to a more eclectic 
way of living, a hunting and gathering of sorts, a beach combing of filling  
steel buckets with beloved poets, philosophers, peacemakers, and rebels.  
And while I can no longer get through a book of Plato or Nietzsche, Achebe, 

Thoreau or Morrison, Baldwin or Angelou or Tan, I can still read them
in excerpts, the way I do my lifetime, grateful to my deepest graduate 
core, that I was gifted with what it took my own teachers decades 
to learn, and that kind of offering can never be replaced—should not be 
replaced—by any trinket or trifle or designer anything. Because it is 
within the most ebony hours, the ones before dawn’s “rosy fingers” reach
for morning sky, those minutes before the alarm rings, or a demanding 

dog or newborn reminds you it is time again to eat, that we need those 
things that are smarter, softer, kinder but firm, things that yield to touch 
without inevitably dissolving, something we can hug closely to our bodies.  
And that is what I am thankful for now, why I write this opus of gratitude,
and number it something or other. That is why I am living a poem, instead 
of another catastrophe: I have cuddled up to the old and familiar, invited 
the new creative, accepted what they can impart, replacing code and betrayal
with symbol and metaphor and imagery, and magically, have not disappeared. 

Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, copyright March 28, 2024, all rights reserved