Ode to the Unfinished
For every completed thing there are a thousand half-begun, abandoned at the first difficulty. This is for them.
Praise the half-built house, its studs exposed to weather, the plywood subfloor warping in the rain. Praise the novel at chapter four, protagonist still unnamed, plot a single strand leading nowhere, everywhere, into blank white.
Praise the quilt with seventeen squares finished, eighty-three still bundles in the drawer, pattern forgotten, fabric discontinued, the quilter moved on to watercolor, to yoga, to silence.
Praise the garden border dug to twelve feet and abandoned when the clay refused to drain. Praise the sourdough starter, fed faithfully for eleven mornings, then left in the back of the refrigerator to crust and darken, a failed civilization in a mason jar.
The world loves completion.
The gallery opening, the book launch, the ribbon cut with oversized scissors. We photograph the finished, frame the final, architects of an aesthetic of arrival. But I am drawn to the scaffolding. The draft. The sketch where the arm is still a gesture, not yet a limb. The poem that ends mid-sentence because the grief was too large for language, and the poet knew it, and stopped.
"There is honesty in the abandoned. The finished often lies."
I have a drawer full of them. Letters written to people who died before mailing. Business plans for shops that existed only in the optimistic precincts of January. Languages begun and stalled at "Where is the bathroom?" and "I do not understand." Each one a door I opened, looked through, chose not to walk. Not failure. Selection.
The unfinished is not the failed. It is the admitted. The honest acknowledgment that time is finite and interest is weather— it shifts, it storms, it clears without warning. To abandon something is to say, finally, this is not for me, and that saying requires more courage than most completions.
So praise the canvases turned to the wall. Praise the manuscripts in boxes, the ceramics cracked in the kiln and never replaced, the songs with two verses and a bridge that goes to nowhere and is beautiful there, in that nowhere, holding a chord like a held breath.
We are all, in the end, unfinished. The completed life is the ended one. These fragments we shore against our ruin— they are the ruin. They are the shore. They are enough.
Composed in the margins of other, longer poems that I also did not finish.
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Praise for the abandoned. Yes. We need more of this in a culture obsessed with completion. The stanza about the half-built bridge is devastating.