My better, true maker: I would make you a wordshop
More private than a bedroom
At the top of narrowing stairs, over a high threshold,
Under a header low enough
To keep all of your comings and goings humble and slow.
It's not a room for living, but for working. The ceiling
is low and crude. The walls are shelved
in cedar to protect the many books, planed plain, only
incidentally beautiful.
The window is high and shortsights a white wall, for light, not view.
The floor makes no concessions: one frivolous sock-slide
and it'll punish you with splinters.
The too-low desk is of the same pallet-wood. The thick door
silences domestic squabble.
I trust your tidy self to regulate the piles of paper.
The jamb says: KEEP OUT, in Roman. Salesmen, children, and wives
Will read this and take the deadbolt
seriously. When your dog is old he can come in
for naps, because dogs want to be
with a working man. He may even make it into your poems.
Your guitar has a stand so you can admire its shape
against the red wall. You will
remember your youthful needs when you see it there.
There is a small mirror turned to
the wall. On the back is painted: BREAK IN CASE OF FIRE.
In the drawer of your too-short desk is a drawing your
masterbuilder gave you: a just-right
desk of flawless oiled cherry, perfect in every way,
the way things are as planned. He will
build it for you when you finish this next poem.
There is no fucking phone, nor anything else you can
plug in except a lamp. The room
is just big enough that you can touch only two walls
at a time if you lie on the floor and
stretch like you're learning a foreign language or yoga.
If the room works as planned, which is to say: perfectly,
then when you go downstairs at the end
of your workday you will blink like Plato must've when
he had been right to the mouth of the cave
and was trying to figure out how to tell everyone about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment