There’s a difference between flotsam and jetsam. Flotsam is whats left floating by a sunken vessel. its the outcome of a disaster. Jetsam is whats thrown overboard in order to perhaps save it, to lighten the load, or to provide flotation once the vessels gone, that is to try to change the outcome. I wrote a poem about Hemingway some years ago that touched on this

We each of us destroy ourselves in different ways

But there’s usually some irony involved

A true hero should be futile after all

Take poor Hemingway

Tossed around on horns and cast aside

A discarded husk before he died

That double wound that did Adonis did him too

When he realised it wasn’t him

Writing

At all

Bulls and boars come

For all those gods and kings

Dancing in the moonlit ring

On the bloodied silver sand

In the forest

In the glade

Which begs the question:

Faust or Oedipus?

An inkling of the tidal flood

A dawning of the awful truth just before the end:

Oh fuck so there’s

a difference

Between flotsam and jetsam

Oh God the bullring

Is the bloody and deluvian moon

Anyway I’m thinking about how i was forced to make decisions about what landscapes needed obliterating, flooding, and what needed saving or in the context of the poem, which parts told me required salvaging?