Taking Time Out From Cleaning the House
Taking time out from cleaning the house
to write a poem,
even this hurried poem,
feels a little like getting away with a
vague crime -- maybe
shoplifting a hug,
or racing in front of an off-duty cop --
and so I'm
savoring it, perhaps even more
than the idea that I might
type toward a flash of
transcendence,
find just the right metaphor to
capture the flavor of
melancholy (wood smoke?).
And perhaps this clutter,
and the clots of fur dotting
the wine-stained carpet,
are also metaphors, and by
cleaning them up I will
erase a crucial sign of
divine energy,
by removing the spill of life from
our sticky surfaces I will
obliterate a bit of our
collective soul,
the messy breath that makes us
a family,
dismantle the comfortable nest
we've shredded from
the ever-loving world.
In fact, it could be that the
tide of chaos
I'm just now not dealing with is
really the poem itself,
and cleaning then
a dark impulse always
to eradicate
a divine energy --
bleaching and vacuuming and wiping
the anti-poem,
the devilish need to put into order
what God has created
perfect in its
holy disorder.
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