To Love and Have Lost

“Blues for Almost Forgotten Music” explores the feeling of lost love, and what it means to look back on those experiences. Throughout the poem the speaker draws parallels between lost love and forgotten music: “Singing over and over what I can recall, I hum remnants on / buses and in the car” (Lines 5-6). This implies that the speaker is ruminating over specific memories of these loves, perhaps searching for the moment that love was lost. The following stanza explores this metaphor by focusing more overtly on the speaker’s “ghosted lovers” (Line 8). The anaphora in this stanza iterates how the speaker is now alone, having lost or given up these opportunities at love. Why this happened, and whether it was by choice or by circumstance, is never established; instead, the situations that led to this moment are left open so that they...