Architect's Map

It’s raining today and I so wish I were in my bed at home under my skylight with the deck door open to better hear the spring rainy sounds. I wish I had all my writing stuff with me (the “input,” I call it—my books and notebooks and photos and music and a beverage—probably tea, as that is all arty) and was writing.

However, I’m in a cubicle eating leftover Thai food with a philodendron and a book on screws. I mean, hardware for medical implants. Those kinds of screws.

My class is writing poems that bring a domestic thing into the center of the poem—it’s supposed to be political. Not as in “I was folding laundry/ and it dawned/on me that/Bush sucks!” but more as in … the silenced issues of domestic craziness.

What came out was interesting: I wrote a poem of a story I did a long time ago that I meant as fiction but oddly… I then realized that almost all of it is TRUE. This was my life—and this is how I learned to knit. (I did, indeed, suck at it and I’m not enough of a perfectionist to ever knit. I have no patience. I will end up hurling the needles and scraggly pot-holder across the room).

I need to revise the poem. Perhaps I’ll post it.

For now, here’s something else for you. It’s a first draft I’ll probably revise this week before class.

Perhaps the love you feel belongs to you.

I am intimate with
the jellies and knobs
of the human spine. Hinged. Rooted.
The trunk of a sycamore.

I know what it is
to stare before sleep as a child
at the same cracks in the ceiling
of our aching house as my father did.

I learned elements on the periodic table
draw together with a purpose,
a drive to make us,
and to make all things.

I once floated on my back in the Indian ocean,
turned my head and saw a man-o-war
floating next to me,
dark veins like an architect’s map.

I believe a creature of nature
is formed of forces and atoms
fiercely determined to unite and abide

but indifferent to our passing.