Partial View

We wake to a world in which every choice
is the wrong one. There should have been
corn, not squash, in the garden; an oak,
not a willow, in the side yard. Long ago,
parents chose the wrong town in which
to live and raise children, and every
conversation since has been a limitation.
Of an artist’s most important piece, critics
—most of them—agree, though easily,
confidently, they could have chosen another.
Robert Carter III, not Washington. Where
might a nation be? What voice at its core?
John Woolman, not Benjamin Franklin.
A different psalm than the 23rd. The novels
we have, as rich as they are, weighed against
the ones we’ve overlooked, the ones no one
wrote. An incompleteness, a partial view.
A meadow that might have been a Louvre,
except a contractor built a row of houses.
The call of one voice, the answer of another,
neither the grace that might have been spoken.