I know your game, poet -- how
your words came to rest there, having fallen
from where they were to where
they must be,
like the day when I do laundry.

On some days the hand-scrawled page in my pocket is a shopping list and no manuscript of any sort, no worship bulletin or urgent pamphlet.

Only on those days when my bristly self is shouted
less by God and more by my neighbors, the rowdy schoolchildren,
the liquorstore man, and all the people I suspect are
streetcorner mystics,

only on those days can I comfortably forget about more wild and divine things -- no,
remember that I know where the wild and divine dwell
because we all live in the same neighborhood.

And I do the laundry, buy the groceries.

here's something for the to-do list:
Let my poems be like my days,
content myself with the emergence of meaning
from disparate words, all
places where it doesn't live
oblique trajectories must contain me
and the hope for a straight shot to truth
must not silence me