writing

Keeping House

Rae Spencer6 Comments

Keeping House

I drifted all day
From stanza to stanza
Keeping house

The laundry sloshed and spun
A swirl of blues and grays
While I sorted and folded
The dry remains
Of yesterday

And I polished layers of dust
Into a desolate sonnet
Praising sloth

I translated the kitchen
Wrote its peculiar vocabulary of spice
Into cryptic recipes
And tilting volumes of scent

Then vacuumed the office
Where spines decayed to anonymous
Motes and filled the air
With sneezes

While in the bathroom sink
A single gray hair mocked
Recalled an absent metaphor

Each room and stanza resisted order
With all the hidden power of entropy
The secret law that governs socks
And salt and hungry ants
And these curls of shredded poems

That speak of duty
Rites and arcane lore
Kept in the rooms of my house

Published in Menagerie June 2010

What Am I?

Rae Spencer4 Comments

What am I
When I’m spinning?

A giddy earthen child
Hair and hands in orbit
All my brilliant paths described
By Riemann’s rumpled planes

When dizzy, I collapse in grass
Yearn toward the evening moon
Enchanted by its gibbous rise
Its constant tide-locked face

Tugs the sea and me alike
The atoms of our mass
Bound ebb to flow, neap to high
By Newton’s Principia

While Schrödinger’s wistful cat
Waits in later pages
Unknown as yet, and left to pace
In undetermined fate

What am I
When I’m sleeping?

A prism child of night
Splintered into photon dreams
Cradled in hot nebulae
And scattered throughout space

A bleak and cold infinitude
Some billion other worlds
Suspended around other stars
In beginning states of grace

Unseen, like ore in deep, hot veins
Compressed beneath the ages
Until revealed by algorithm
And captured in equation

With Schrödinger’s hapless cat
Purring at my side
Alive and dead, unrealized
An enigma in time’s keeping