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Oscillation
March 14, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

and when the papers have been filed, reports and
payment vouchers, room requests and purchase
orders, when the dossiers have been tendered

to the proper offices and the staplers tendered
to their drawers and the drawers returned to their
wooden sleeves, when the printers and copiers

have cooled and the office chairs swivel back
into place, when the feet rest quiet on the plastic
pads that protect the cheap commercial carpet

and the cheap commercial carpet closes its fiber
and its pores, when all it harbors gathers to its
benthos some new crush of breath-mint or toner,

when the offices have quieted at last and the tube-
lights flicker dim, when the students have boarded
the trains and buses and carpool vans and scooters

or walked off toward the mountains or the creek
or the downtown yawning bars, the happy hours
of abandon and abandonment, when all colleagues

have memoed their good-nights in outboxes
and e-mail boxes and the elevators have descended
at last for the trash-cans and vacuums and the late

shift I meet in my departure, when the snow
has spun around us in the sodium light like comets'
dust or galaxy, when the stars emerge above the burn

the city gives to the night and this abuse settles down,
when the hands slip from the bed and the blood
pools in the tips of the fingers and the words crowd

to the skin of the ears and the small hooks of the tongue
and the rarely-watering mouth gathers its wet like
ink, when there is a then, then there will be a then: and

Posted by Jake Adam York at March 14, 2005 6:28 PM