has been getting bigger every year,
a repository of the lost and never found,
a deserted hospital of still births, 
fragments, slips of this, wisps of that, 
scraps of the conscious mind, lines

stilled on backs of envelopes,
gum wrappers, ruminations,
forgotten complaints, a promise
I made to Daphne to take her
to Paris in a poem that dissolved

sometime last winter, and still I think
these abandoned things will scutter 
about some night, find each other,
copulate into something rich and rare,
for this I toss in a few pencil stubs

hoping they will collaborate
with poetic bits, malformed
memories that no one will believe,
from a landfill of glyphs
in a basket-home I cannot discard.

I imagine the wastebasket an elegy
to elegy, to the indecisive, the reluctant,
the elusive, that in the dark, creep closer 
to my desk where my submission’s log is kept,
to consume my rejections in one gulp

to make an acceptable whole, and so
my basket is a growing thing I cannot 
throw out, a poem itself—I imagine 
an ancient golden Grecian urn holding some
strange hope for the lost, the might-have-been.