Lines Lost Among Trees - Billy Collins Sunday

LINES LOST AMONG TREES
by Billy Collins from Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press)

These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.
 
They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic
 
I devised to hold them in place-
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in back of our quiet house
 
with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.
 
So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of syntax,
the jazz of the timing,
 
and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.
 
This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem-
not out into the world of strangers' eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,
 
home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,

which, like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.


I'd like to add to the above list of lost things, documents that can't be recovered from hard drives that crash.  Which is what happened to me this morning after I rolled the short distance from my bed to my desk, planning to post before breakfast.  The good news is there are about two weeks left on my laptop warranty so I can pack it up tomorrow and ship it off to be fixed for free.  The bad news is that I discovered that the automatic weekly file back ups I had scheduled stopped running in early February.

It might be better if, like the lines of the poem, I couldn't remember the details of what's been lost.  As I spent a few hours attempting error checks and system recoveries, I worried over what was lost like prayer beads, the strand growing longer as I recalled more work I'd done last month-- the two weeks worth of brainstorming and planning that I neatly organized in on-line notebooks, several days worth of tedious research into grant-giving organizations, a handful of miscellaneous documents.  All lost.

This morning my plan was to announce Billy Collins Sunday-- a day of rest from the usual poem and reflection/question format.  I had a poem picked out and absolutely no reflection or thought provoking questions to offer, just a few stanzas to be enjoyed in and of themselves. 

If you want to still do that, stop reading here and go do something else.  If you want a bit of wisdom, I'll share the lesson I gleaned from this poem and my experience today:  sometimes things are lost and we have to accept it and let them go.

And I will go ahead and offer a question to go along with that:  when was the last time you backed up your work?