The Most Secret Poetry
“Haydn whose decidedly un-musical wife apparently used his manuscripts as hair curlers”
Try not to think of all the poems lost
In time. Eternity must hold them in
Some hidden and immortal bank, not tossed
Away completely. Yet for us the twin
Of history is all the things not saved
In writing on a scrap of paper, or
A bundle, or a scroll—perhaps engraved
On granite—or untidy in a drawer
Forgotten and unopened for the years
Of long millennia. But what about
The lines forever lost in ragged spheres
Like dumps, lines accidentally we’ve thrown out?
..And what about the ones left lying on
….A bus seat, scrawled poems forever gone?