one of the scariest things that can happen to a writer is to discover that they have lost, or almost lost, what could have been a really good poem. i found out today that a poem i'd almost forgot i'd written for my creative project was entirely absent from any of my poetry files. i must have deleted it or not saved it, but it's just not there. it's a pretty good poem, though. i wrote it about a picture i took in albuquerque; it seemed to be just a street at night, and i couldn't remember why i took it then, and then i did, so i wrote the poem. it has potential. i'm reminded of a quote "a poem is never finished, only abandoned." i agree. i'm always making tiny revisions to poems when i look over them weeks, months, years later, a comma here, taking out a period there. nothing major. walt whitman went through nine editions of "leaves of grass" before he was satisfied. or maybe he just died; maybe he would have kept on revising and revising in perpetuity. i'm reminded of a line from wallace stevens "a fantastic effort has failed, a repetition in a repetitiousness of men and flies..." poetry is always coming to my mind at the oddest moments, and it often makes me sad that i can't share it with others around me, either because i could not give a suitable translation from my recollection to words or because i sense they simply wouldn't care.