Poetrie: The Poems I Have Not Written

About

by John Brehm

I’m so wildly unprolific, the poems

I have not written would reach

from here to the California coast

if you laid them end to end.

And if you stacked them up,

the poems I have not written

would sway like a silent

Tower of Babel, saying nothing

and everything in a thousand

different tongues. So moving, so

filled with and emptied of suffering,

so steeped in the music of a voice

speechless before the truth,

the poems I have not written

would break the hearts of every

woman who’s ever left me,

make them eye their husbands

with a sharp contempt and hate

themselves for turning their backs

on the very source of beauty.

The poems I have not written

would compel all other poets

to ask of God: "Why do you

let me live? I am worthless.

please strike me dead at once,

destroy my works and cleanse

the earth of all my ghastly

imperfections." Trees would

bow their heads before the poems

I have not written. "Take me,"

they would say, "and turn me

into your pages so that I

might live forever as the ground

from which your words arise."

The wind itself, about which

I might have written so eloquently,

praising its slick and intersecting

rivers of air, its stately calms

and furious interrogations,

its flutelike lingerings and passionate

reproofs, would divert its course

to sweep down and then pass over

the poems I have not written,

and the life I have not lived, the life

I’ve failed even to imagine,

which they so perfectly describe.