The Island of Lost Poems

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Lost: Late night composition. Sort of a haiku. 15 -19 syllables. Two of the words ended in the syllable “ate” like “potentate” or “refrigerate” .  .  . maybe. There was some kind of allusion to Helen of Troy, or the Trojan war in general. Reward for its undamaged return.

I know better. You know I know better. We’ve been through this before. I told myself “You are going to forget this if you don’t write it down.” But the bed was so cozy and sleep the mere turn of the pillow away.

“No, really,” I said to me. “I can do this. It’s a short little thing. If I just repeat it to myself a few more times I know I will remember it in the morning.”

And so I did. Sure enough as the morning sun swept crystalline in through the windows I remembered . . . having thought about something before falling asleep. A shopping list? Maybe a doctor’s appointment? What I was going to make for breakfast? The name of that girl who stole my heart in 5th grade? Pat? Pam? I dunno. It was only when my stomach called me to lunch that the notion of a poem tickled the old cranium. It was later still when the few fragments noted above straggled in.

Where do they go, these seemingly timeless bursts of poetic purity that vanish behind the simple shade of sleep?  I think it was back in August of 2012 that I first wrote about Alternia, an iteration of the multiverse that I posited was the flip side of dementia. Invisible to us in the current dominant universe, it was the place to which I supposed my father increasingly slipped away for pleasant conversation as he eased past his hundredth birthday. Closed to us. I could not accept that his insightful and witty responses had simply ceased to be. It comforted me to assert that I could possibly slip over an existential sidewalk, and chat again with him as my bare feet explored the soft green grass of Alternia.

Is it so unreasonable to posit that perhaps there is a gentle island not far off the shores of Alternia? Sandy beaches covered with pastel sands that somehow fail to stick to surf-slicked bodies? Soft breezes slide through palm fronds that have never known hurricane or tsunami? And there, quietly bobbing along the rainbow shoreline, are myriad sunset-colored bottles containing the rolled scrolls of all those poems that we carelessly set free in the lazy hours after midnight. It is, I choose to believe, the Island of Lost Poems.

Back in 1975 The Righteous Brothers wrote, bemoaning the deceased luminaries of their genre, “If there’s a rock and roll heaven, You know they’ve got a hell of a band.” It staggers me to imagine the poetic riches scattered along the beaches of the Island of Lost Poems. The collected verse of all our sincere, but futile promises: “I’ll remember you in the morning. Really, I will. I promise!” That beach catalog would, I think, rival the Great Lost Library of Alexandria which, who knows, may rest only an Island or two away - just over the horizon. 
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