What Would Be Most Useful to Do

So much of life you lived with the rest
Of your life in your thoughts, on your mind.
Memory returns to a marble

Baluster you recall as smooth stone
As you walked past on your way from class,
Considering, where would you land next?

In what country or part of this one
Should you start your career?
Back then, futures always came with plans,

And there was always some strategy
Or daydream passing for strategy
About what steps would be cleverest.

Memory returns as boys smoking
Stolen cigarettes around a fire
In a drab campground, What will you be,

What will you become? A roadrunner
Strides to the window-door in the sun
That is the most recent happening

And peers in at you, safe from the cats
Stuck upstairs for too long. Memories
Of their own must haunt all these lives some.

But every time you remember you,
You not only dredge up past but past
Futures you remember, absences

That finally strike you now as strange,
Given they flicker and sputter out,
And you can’t think what would be useful.