Cheating on Company Time
Since we are miserly with time,
our appetite is scheduled: adultery
or lunch. Every working hour,
leave accrues: a month’s vacation
in a well of years. Who plays the numbers?
We do, sign the promissory
notes. We fill out time cards
for our dance with guilt. We say
we’re out to lunch and come back late,
a pretext for our assignations.
At 2 and 3 and 4 we’re waltzing in,
resolutions broken, picturing
a phantom at the desk, where,
had we stayed, we would be still
and real and admirably working.
Burrow
The corridor through the woods
was once a cow lane.
Apartment D-4 was a pasture.
Your dwelling is, for me,
a place where I dig in,
walled off from what’s around us.
The present in an enclave in the past
as a clearing was, for Cherokee,
an enclave in the bush.
What will become of us
is like the evidence of history
that litters the woods.
Think of a cow amid
this housing complex.
Put the cow on asphalt
in the parking lot.
We limit where we look
like the cows
that ran the lane to pasture,
their only thought for grazing.
