The Poet on the lampoon rebuilds the habitat
kitchen light
i.
A swimmer’s shoulder is a sentence the water finished. A spine curved toward the keys is the desk, remembered by bone.
Even asleep, the hare’s ears turn toward a field that isn’t in the room.
Every way of standing was once an answer. Hold it long enough and you forget the question, but not the answer. The answer goes on standing.
ii.
Now build the room around him.
Drop ceiling. Toner hum. Carpet the color of weak tea. The badge reader blinks its one green word. In he walks, chin up toward a horizon, weight on the back foot as if the copier might charge.
There’s gold on his shoulders from no sun that shines here. The office is blue-white and patient. Nothing in it has ever needed slaying.
We aren’t laughing at him. We’re laughing at the distance: the mountain pass you can see behind his stance the way you see a hand inside a glove.
iii.
The caricaturist sharpens. He takes the nose up to its point, the place where no one can stand.
The lampoonist sweeps the floor, hangs the right fluorescent tube, sets the queue at its exact slow tempo, and steps back.
One draws what you hide. The other draws where you live. It is harder to be wounded by an address.
Empty the chair, and you learn what the chair was doing. Fill the room, and you learn where the sitter came from. Two hands working in opposite directions on the same lock.
iv.
My mother at the sink at dusk: her lean over the dishwater, the streetlight sodium-orange through the steam, the radio’s low brown murmur.
Rebuild all of it, exaggerate nothing, and the joke is so soft it’s almost a blessing: of course. Look at the room that made her. Look at the shape the room kept of her.
v.
And you, half-dissolved in the dark of the case, with something organizing in you that has no name yet:
before you take the shape you were handed, hold it up to this light. Not the light of the story. This light: the bus shelter’s, the laundromat’s, four o’clock on a Tuesday in March.
If it looks ridiculous here, it was born somewhere else.
Look for the angle that matches the walls, the one whose shoulders make sense without a quest, the one already the color of where you are.