PAD Day 24: What Could Have Been

 Today's prompts:

WBP: Write a "maximum" poem.

NPWM: "...write a poem that begins with a line from another poem (not necessarily the first one), but then goes elsewhere with it. This will work best if you just start with a line of poetry you remember, but without looking up the whole original poem. Or you could find a poem that you haven’t read before and then use a line that interests you. "

PSH: "Write about options of any kind. To choose one leaves others behind. Personalize an option left behind and write from its perspective. The option might be relieved, excited it wasn’t chosen, or feel rejected." (Kathleen Hunkele Schardin)

So here is mine, using all three prompts. I picked my beginning line more or less at random: I have the Copper Canyon anthology A House Called Tomorrow, which is an excellent fifty-year retrospective of poets they have published. I  haven't got that far into it, but I skipped to the more recent poems in the back, found a poet whom I have read and like, and picked a line I liked from her poem without reading the whole poem first. I also decided to use her line as an epigram rather than a first line. As far as the "maximum" prompt goes, I just kind of worked the word into the poem rather than making it a major focus of the theme.

A Note from the Ph.D. You Never Got
 
[I]t’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.
                                                                —Ellen Bass, Indigo
 
Just wanted you to know I am alive and well,
mounted on the wall of a Rutgers professor
who heads the Psychology Department,
is widely published, and just went Emeritus.
 
I know sometimes you have regrets,
having dropped out after a year of grad school,
but it looks like you have done okay—
your writing, your government service,
a happy marriage, kids and grandkids.
 
Getting me would have taken maximum effort,
but maybe not for maximum return.
You should also know that if you went
down that path, you would have had
an affair in your 40s with a pretty young student
that would have ended your marriage, two sons
who never speak to you, and an accident
on Boylston Street in Boston that would have
left you walking with a cane.
 
And don’t think the Rutgers prof has no regrets—
but I’m not at liberty to discuss them.
 
So you don’t have me on your wall. Big deal.
Instead, there are pictures of your family
and your wife of fifty years.