The lapidary
polishes his gemstones,
smooth, all-seeing eyes worn on fingers or
around the neck,
as if in a Picasso portrait where features
are angled and odd.
He frowns, disturbed by the way perfection
is crudely displayed.
He holds the facets and curves—a plane, a
circle, an ellipse—
to the grinding wheel, looking for the
flaws of nature’s compression.
Removing his jeweler’s loupe, a surgeon
putting down his ten blade,
he steps back from the magic on his bench
and proclaims on the seventh day that it’s
good—all good.
I wake in the morning and drag titanium
across my cheek
until there is no stubble left on the long,
angular field.
I bathe to wash away the grit from fevered
dreams and misfires,
bruises where I stumbled despite the
well-worn path of the known.
I wipe steam from the mirror before I
leave—polish, and polish again—
obsessively overruling evaporation’s
natural law.
I move with the sun, wash the car and mow
the lawn,
put on a white shirt and tie until my life
is manicured and clipped
and hemmed in on all sides by a zoning
ordinance of the mind.
Later, when the sun has burnt the
freshness of flowers
and pulled down the inevitable shade of
night,
I throw my suit into a humbled heap in the
corner.
I look through old books, the spines
cracked,
pages yellow, dogeared, torn,
and read poems I haven’t seen since Milton
was my greatest care.
It is there I discover the rough edges of
my youth,
when I studied the art of studying for the
sake of nothing but art.
Life overflowed from Arthur’s chalice in
uneven silver streams
that needed no order, no riverbank to
contain spontaneous joy.
I have polished my life only to uncover flawed facets
that were the vainglorious order of a day
that was angled and odd.
I step back from the desk and behold my
salad days,
intuition guiding me into overgrown,
untrodden ways,
and know at this eleventh hour that it was
all so very wild and good.
~William Hammett
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