"The Poems I Have Lost."
"She said to take the L train, too.
I know where I left them--
on the floor of her apartment with five locks on 13th
Street, Somewhere Else City, USA.
I don't think I'll ever go back.
A young couple picked me up just east, miles out of Asheville.
Had just started a poem, too, and we
stopped and smoked at a roadside table
at the edge of June tobacco fields.
I lost them somewhere between there and the Atlantic Ocean.
I wrote Duffy a long rambling letter.
Called it a "Poem from Nashville"
because I got lonesome for sunsets in Colorado springtime,
and then dropped the letter in the mailbox.
I wonder if it ever found her in Juneau, Alaska.
The last thing I remember was leaning into the roots
of a pinyon tree.
It wasn't the horse that had thrown me.
It wasn't McAllister either, who owned the horse.
It was all that damn beer we had been drinking all afternoon.
I got a letter from St. Paul, Minnesota,
inviting me up there to read poems.
I fell off the plane in Denver, lost my ticket and most
of my poems, but managed to hold on enough to a few remaining
things.
Memories, I guess they are, crowd me
because of all the signals.
I've missed the poems that keep coming back in pieces--
fragments remain with me, of course.
I touch the bare skeletons, smell the old things,
and see new visages past many, many times.
Those are enough."