Where Do Poems Go When They Die?

Everywhere I look they’re gone.
Pages and pages of poems, lost forever;
Only ghostly forms drift in my mind
Like smoke rising above blackened trees--
Their music with limbs and leaves
Of shrouded oaks burned into empty computer shells
And stubby stumps, scorched,
Distorted, all dead.
One has to smile at occasional visions of nonsense.
I know where they are:
In a folder in the office,
In a notebook in the bookcase,
In complementary copies of folded journals.
Or maybe in the computer’s hard drive
Backing up everything that forms
The flesh and bone of a man’s soul.
Ah! But everything is gone.
Where do the words of poems go
When the wind lifts them from the white pages
Whose edges are smeared with ash?