come and go

a freshman year collection of poetry... i could never find the one i loved.

one late homework evening i became bored of my assignments and started to read some poetry aloud.

i found one that has stuck with me, the kind where you can see how the words fall on the page and how it made you feel, but you can’t remember anything specific enough to look it up.

granted, i couldve used google a little more enthusiastically, but i did glance through all the thrown out copies of the Norton Reader whenever i came across them- hoping to catch another glimpse of this lost poem. well, i had managed to fall in love with one of American poetry’s most famous works of all time: the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

the entire poem brings you in. you are part of this. how wild to walk into a little bookstore of Bowery st. past any reasonable hour for a bookstore to be open and you T.S. Elliot’s collection of The Waste Land and other poems... and EVEN then i simply looked at the first page and read

”let us go then, you and I,

when the evening is spread out against the sky“

it wasn’t until i got back to the hotel, makeup off, under the covers and read

”In the room the women come and go

talking of Michelangelo“

this is it. my lost poem. my famous poem that was never actually lost: i was simply too oblivious to ever learn the title.