Poetry in the Cubicle

I did not sleep well and I didn’t dream, but for thinking about where to begin the user guide for such a multifaceted software application. Where to begin, how to begin, this is always the problem. Of course, I’m speaking of in between:

1. The user enters a logon ID.
2. The system requests a password.
3. The user enters a password.
4. The user logs off.

This is the cubicle in which I work. Blue and almond. I praise the inventor of the pin-clips that allowed me to hang things on these blue cloth walls. The fasteners that allowed me to move to the wider surfaces the reminders and bits of inspiration that before had been restricted to being taped along the narrow steel borders.

I work in a cubicle that serves me well,
otherwise I would lose form and disappear
into my intentions to explain what I see.

My mind wanders always to a poem I cannot write. I have no window that leads me to dream of Guadalajara. Nevertheless, the poem I cannot write moves inside me. Often it leaves me and ascends the steel-bound walls, like a rock climber. It makes footholds from the clips of photos and mementos, then dissolves into the calendar. It moves past the days and weeks of my schedule of interviews with the analyst and developers of current applications.

My desk is steel and hard, of polished fibers;
it supports me when I lean into it with the points
of my elbows; it holds even the poem inside me
that moves like a child inside a woman, and kicks,
waking me, when all I want is sleep. If I were a woman
I would not curse it as I do and turn my body to escape.

The poem finds my yesterdays. It wants me to remember when I first heard a heartbeat other than my own. I say to it, there are places of which I have read, but can never go. I try to imagine the space between one world and another, between this life and one before, but gravity is not a dream, or if it is, it is one where what wings are mine are tethered to space and time. When I follow the poem I cannot write, therefore, it is to the winter branches of my childhood and even if in the high green leaves of a tree that checkered the houses into maps I can remember, even then I am only a whistle from home and the user guide, searching still for the poem I cannot write, somewhere I would be invisible.

The weight of the poem I cannot write depends
on my relentless arrivals and departures from these walls,
this slick, almond surface where I rest my body
and occupy my imagination with lesser things,
like the pop of data from asynchronous queues,
and daemons that open access to restricted domains.

In the realm of days and weeks, the poem finds my tomorrows and pulls me there to witness life and death. It is heavy with oceans I have crossed and snow that rests upon a mountain I awoke to once, reflected in a lake. It is heavy with the clip on my blue wall that holds a line from Wallace Stevens’ The Dove In the Belly, “Fetched up with snow that never falls to earth.” The poem is heavy with places yet unseen and heartbeats not yet shared. In its body is both the necessary angel of death and exuberance of grandchildren not yet born and within them the secret and the weight that life is everlasting.

The poem of my future rests its feet in the clip where Tracy K Smith writes, “All that we see grows/Into the ground. And all that we live blind to/Leans its deathless heft to our ears and sings.” This wakes me to the task at hand, the user guide. It makes me know I need to listen. It grounds me more than gravity and the daemons of my life. It has become part of the walls to which I return each day and from which I escape each night.

They are a respite from a reality I do not fully understand.
In yet another room, a space of strange and terrible transparency,
I sit, a tiny system of immense and invisible wonder,
typing letters and symbols to describe a world
slung in the bent fabric of the sky,
balanced somehow between light and air.

 Photo by Victor Bezrukov, Creative Commons via Flickr. Post and stanzas from The Weight of the Poem I Cannot Write by Richard Maxson.

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Rick Maxson

I’ve had the pleasure of living in many places coast to coast and even Spain for a while. I have always had a love affair with mountains, second only to my wife. I am a poet and the Poetry Editor for Every Day Poems for T.S. Poetry Press. After ten years with Hewlett-Packard as a Technical Writer and Business Analyst, I retired in 2017. Find me on Twitter @theimaginedjay.

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