Lisa Barnett: “Unfinished Classics”
UNFINISHED CLASSICS
Proust with his madeleine still poised above
the cup; Natasha on the stairs before
her first grand ball; poor Dodo still in love
with Mr. Casaubon—how many more
must languish where you leave them in each book
you start but don’t complete? Like talk show guests
forgotten in the green room, they’re overlooked;
denied the telling of what happens next
though there’s so much that they have yet to say.
It always seems you’ve other things to do,
and so at last you put the books away
and Paris, Moscow, Middlemarch are through.
And yet sometimes you feel at odds, diminished—
because you left their stories mute, unfinished.
Lisa Barnett’s poems have appeared in Hudson Review, Measure, Orchards Poetry Journal, Poetry, Snakeskin, the anthologies Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets and Extreme Sonnets, and elsewhere. She is a three-time Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award finalist and is the author of the chapbook, Love Recidivus, published by Finishing Line Press.