Just What You Would Have Been

If only you could
Have been what you would
And not what you could.

If you dwell on this,
Sages say you’ll miss
Everything that’s good.

Dwell on what you wish.
Life, if it weren’t this,
Would be what you would.

The Lost Road

It used to connect.
That was what it did.
Its identity
Was crisply defined,
Nearly a straight line

Linking a couple more
Roads between two towns.
It got lost somehow.
It can’t find the end
Or the beginning.

It loops through the pines,
Wandering, a road
But not to town, script
Fallen off the map,
Unpunctuated,

Cursive, elegant
But wholly alone.
It does not give up.
It is a brave road,
A beautiful road,

Scenic all the way.
The shadows cross it
In shifting scribbles
That tell it nothing.
It comforts itself.

Nonentity Wrapped in Enigma

An event suggests some words:
Duck flies down, lands on the pond.
Encountered later, these words

Will suggest something different,
Reimagined memories
Inside of another skull,

But only if that skull holds
Most of these words already,
Plus knowledge of their syntax.

It is a cold pond, in fall,
A sunny but windy day.
The waves look choppy and blue.

No one’s boating or fishing.
No one’s swimming or freezing—
All events that have happened

In this pond’s vicinity,
Different water and weathers,
Similar ducks in the waves.

What’s your memory done now?
What nonentity wrapped in
An enigma have you seen?

Two Very Nice Girls Who Ran a Sandwich Place

One of Hemingway’s lesser-known

Depictions, from a handwritten

Letter sent to Maxwell Perkins,

Describes the grim recovery

Of bloated bodies following

The devastating hurricane

Of 1935 that tore

Through parts of the Florida Keys—

More dead than I’d seen in one place

Since the Great War, 1918–

And, most of those dead, veterans

Who, having survived that conflict,

Had ended up in a work camp

In the midst of the Depression,

Living in shacks on Windley Key.

Now their bodies sprawled, like cordwood,

Scattered everywhere and bloated,

But the most disturbing passage

In his description of the scene

Lies where Hemingway writes Perkins

Of the bodies of two women

Stripped naked by the storm and thrown

Into the branches of a tree—

Swollen and stinking . . . breasts as big

As balloons, flies between their legs.

I recognize them as the two

Very nice girls. . . . Very nice girls?

Something in his language suggests

That death made whores of them, or that

Bloated corpses with bloated breasts

And flies between their legs (surely

The flies were hardly so confined)

Shouldn’t be expected to turn

Out to be two very nice girls

Who ran a sandwich place. What gives?

Were women so sexualized

In his mind that even in death

Naked female bodies could be

Only grotesquely erotic?

His focus seems more than morbid,

More than mere memento mori.

Was death, for him, pornography?

The mind shakes itself off, moves on,

Other things to read. The women

Whose ghosts entered Hemingway

To emerge disturbingly phrased

Are wholly words now, as are we,

As is Ernest Hemingway, whose

Own ghost spins weirdly through dead texts,

Copied from holograph to page

To code to haunt another age.

Pining Away

People have been buzzing about trees
In conversation with other trees,
Eavesdropping on chemical chats

With elaborate prosthetic ears
And laboratory measurements.
We wonder what the trees think of that,

Among their talkative roots and twigs.
It takes a long time to be a tree.
Sit under a mature one some year

Then return half your lifetime later.
If it hasn’t been cut, burned, blown down,
Your tree will seem pretty much the same

While you have withered. Tree life goes on,
We suppose, filled with information
Relevant to living as a tree.

One stands by the side of a lost road,
Just growing, apparently. Watch it
And wonder how trees would sense wonder.