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Worksong

As I work, half-dead to the call of bare feet in damp earth
or oiled fingers glancing over knotted calves
It is now when I need the poetic eye
like a filter, or a sluice
My office becomes a yellow kitchen just small enough to allow
heat from a copper stove to spread like cheer
My desk is transformed into a table
strewn with shallots shaped like pearls
My computer is now a Victrola, spinning

records with names like "Music for a Golden Lyre"
And bits of ocean spray rise from the drunk horizon
to salt my garden, which runs harlotous with summer's heat
lustful tomatoes begging release
and Iceland poppies preening in reckless glory

From the straining waistband of overfull
from the jagged toenail of nevermind
and the voting booths of despair
I dunk down
and reach for the pages I creased in books as a child:
swaying desert passage, idle forest bower, pepperpot Cassiopeia
I cross over to a place with cloud-shadowed streets
where unnumbered buses shift down alleys marked
not by zipcode but by hair ribbons of drying laundry
and altars made from shells where saints rise full like Venus
Where a public fountain choked with leaves sobs its loneliness
to a lizard whose tongue is a hinged jewel

Beyond the square a highway opens its legs
to an empty route where signs boast that this stretch of road
is cared for by devotees of Bacchus, that one by a crow
Entering a town whose off-ramp is marked only by
a low pile of stones, veined with iron pyrite
it grows hot and close as if the wind
were caught in the throats of the yawning cats
who prowl the vaulting rooftops like amber-eyed guards
while children below sleep with damp curls and flushed cheeks
fanned by the fluttering wings of splintered shutters
The clock has stopped in its tower
hands endlessly shrugging 3 o'clock
Forgotten kites pant like dogs
and even the moths barely rise

Perhaps these idylls are merely a book-marked place
on a computer whose sole function is to manufacture
documents that are lifeless except in their gleeful
hunger for youth and time, and their obscene pleasure
in the hunched back, the strained eye, the deferred dream
but which even you would agree must be carefully spell-checked
and entered into a spreadsheet of innumerable size
figures eased into their tight slots with a coat of coffee
gone bitter and tarry

But still
from life's unyielding meat
from the buttoned collar of boredom
and the dust mote of indifference
I dunk down
looking through the shattered eyeglass of poesy
which is blue as the wings of some humming thing
that dogs the steps of creek-side lovers
and see in hot-eyed double vision: pepperpot Cassiopeia,
swaying dessert passage, idle forest bower
The phone sings like a Gamelon

Learn more about this author, Sarah Torribio.
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