We want what we want, and we want it
when we want it, by which I mean,
if I had to live with myself, I’d find it impossible—although, don’t I?

Last night, my husband went out with friends, and I
ached for his presence, felt bereft, and today
he’s home, vacuuming. He’s even vacuuming

the plinth filter — unpleasant object, housed inside
a high-strung dryer—a dryer
with two sets of instructions—

the word essential in bold, on the cover of one,
and the words, not a substitute, on the cover
of the slender version, for those who’ve read the first, or never will.

He’s doing this noble activity—
with the radio for company—and I
want silence, and to be left alone,

even though, as a child, I saw what could happen
if you got what you wished for: Burgess Meredith,
all those books, and no glasses.

Less grown up than I was, say, at 11, and more confused, I’m on my way
to the grocery store, wishing all my poems could be handed
to the machine I’ve seen along the Gowanus Canal—

I’m not sure what it measures, only that it’s there
to measure something one might least expect, and I’d like to think
it does its job with mysterious and uncomplaining accuracy.

I’d like to give that machine all my drafts—
my nearly done, my barely started,
the unwritten, and the overwritten—and it,

not easily tired or distractable, would go through
all the drafts. Go through meaning resolve
everything. With all the time I would then have on my hands—

time on one’s hands translating into
who knows what shape, what substance, what weight,
moving at what speed or degree of slowness—

I’d like to know—my hands
now full of time—would I be
theoretically kinder?

Do I need to say more? No one wants an explanation, do they?
Certainly not a self-serving one, and, really,
is there any other kind? But I would like to add

what Galway Kinnell once said in a workshop.
“Don’t call it work,” he scolded. “That’s coal mining,
that’s digging ditches, that’s working the line.”

In a different workshop, I was told, if nothing else,
the poet should know the answer to this:
to whom is the poem addressed? And I’d like to ask

the machine on the Canal:
Is this a love poem? And will anyone who reads it
believe it, or know it.

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Image: “Checkerboard Machine” from The Dollar Store Estate Sale Collection