W is for what might have been or what I might have written. Can I be influenced by what I might have done but didn't? -- as if the choice to write what I couldn't or didn't were still before me. It is not as if what I might have written exists, even as a possibility. Still, I sometimes say to myself that if I hadn't done this, I might have done that, even if I don't know what that might be. What I might have written stands in shadowy, sober judgment of what I might have written. It gathers whatever self it has and comes, unbidden, to visit me. W is also for what I would never have written because I could not have, even in a thousand years. A conceivable source of unhappiness, it is in fact a relief. Think if I had written the first hundred or so lines in Book XIII of the 1805 Prelude, what a great poet I would be. I would have to destroy everything else I had written to keep people from saying, "What a falling off there has been in Strand's work." So I wouldn't be me, and I would not have my poems, and I would have nothing to worry about. W is for Wordsworth, who wrote what I didn't and couldn't and won't. --

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