Routine Maintenance

a poem

They say to write what you know. I usually write to understand what I don’t know.

I write essays because essays are generous. They let me qualify, wander, double back, change my mind, and often leave more and more refined questions on the table than I started with.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been wrestling with a basket of ideas that kept resisting explanation. It wanted images instead of arguments, compression instead of exposition. So, after more than three years of essays at The Junction, here's something new: my first poem.

I am actively resisting the temptation to share the narratives that gifted me this poem. I want to tell you about my source material, my process, and my utter trepidation in sharing this. I want to write an essay about why a poem, how it arrived, and how I feel about it.

All of that is beside the point.

I wrote a poem. Here it is.

Routine Maintenance

In the delicate passages between procedures, 
a rapidly aging man shelters behind his ashen beard.
Neither he nor the beard want to be tamed, 
but neither know what to do with freedom.

Quixotically convinced he can make old friends,
he rummages through ticket stubs. 
Chasing hope through silted channels, 
he toggles between palliatives. 

Seeking solace sorting a sack of tangled cables,
he stumbles into a twinkling pause. An invitation. 

Across the room, family photos fade on a hard drive. 
An unstrung guitar idles in a weathered case. 
A tilt-top tea table wobbles on a settled floor. 

From the window, a bicycle chain rusts and sags. 
Brandywine tomatoes droop from the vine. 
The neighborhood pub forgets the weight of elbows. 

Beneath the tracks, an orchid is clipped to a bamboo stake outside the Vietnamese florist.
It dances in the dusty rush of passing trains. 

In a subterranean pantry, a Siberian hamster sorts the contents of his cheek pouches.  
He grooms his coat as winter gathers on the Mongolian steppe. 

This, too, shall be tended to. 

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