I mourn those lost and lovely poems,
the ones not written,
left to founder in the faze of time.
They came too easily, perhaps:
the fragrant lines, the granite images,
all the lively phrases never turned to sums.
They felt as real as what I write now,
maybe more so,
being fragmentary, flushed, aflame.
They came and went
as I stepped awkwardly into a bath
or looked around me on the gravel path
or turned my back toward a wall of sleep.
Their vanishing was eerily complete.
It took so little just to lose their thread,
and I’m still missing what was almost said.