Kerfuffle in Mind

You were told you were in complete
Remission, and six weeks later
You were told the cancer was back,

Bad, and raring to take over.
What’s unnerving in retrospect
Isn’t so much the way you learned—

Life in the air, life libre, life
Snatched away—but how little changed
In your daydreaming cavalcade.

You were hardly at all upset.
First, you considered cautiously
The hopeful, possible futures,

Then you told yourself you could think
About years and decades freely,
Which you tried. Then the curtain fell,

Or you were promised that it would,
Which kicked daydreaming to the curb.
What a miniature turmoil,

Permissible thoughts in your skull
Fizzing a bit while you waited
For further announcements from those

Same confident folks said you’d die,
Said you might in fact live, said you
Were likely to live a while, said

You were guaranteed soon to die.
A tiny kerfuffle in mind,
That hardly bothered you at all.

Epistolary Wake of the Mind

Scholars gather and edit
The letters of famed writers
And political leaders,

Collected volumes of which
Get reviewed in magazines
Appealing to the learnèd.

Invariably, letters
Reveal a more human side,
That is, a more personal,

Individual writer,
Than the famous writings showed.
Letter writers waffle more,

Permit themselves often to be
Childish, petulant, greedy,
Compared to their published selves.

In the reviews, the volumes
Provide a higher gossip
And more interior life

For reviewers and readers
To discover and ponder.
There, one grows aware of mind

As an elegant stranger,
A soul almost alien
Wandering from skull to skull,

While what the skulls keep anchored
Is only part mind, wholly
Animal. A long visit

From the creative mind
Yields the peculiar ideas
That made the skull linked to them

Famous, or remarkable,
And mind plus higher gossip
Entice the letter readers,

And that’s fine, although the mind
Has decamped to other skulls
Carrying its elegance.

A full history of thought
Would mostly involve the mind,
That traveler, that sophist,

In all its variations,
Visiting the many skulls
Left to gossip in its wake.