OLD SCREW, NEW TURN

    One benefit of my poor memory
    Is that I get to write a poem again,
    Forgetting what I’d written previously,
    But going then where I have never been.

    The subject or the issue is the same,
    Yet once the beat and rhymes begin anew,
    I find I’m chasing after novel game
    Or following breadcrumbs the Muse may strew,

    So off I go on quite a different track
    With no idea where my verse will end,
    For what’s ahead is hidden in the black
    That lightens only as I round each bend

         And, rhyme by rhyme, I find my novel course
         Revealed, it seems, by some assisting source.

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