One Good Poem

(I originally wrote this in 2001.)

The Linguist and the Carpenter

From the library
He ambles while she floats and calculates,
he with plans in head and she with balanced tomes.
He knew love from early on while she knew only obsession.

He will take her home where she will narrate his exhaustion.
He thinks she doesn’t understand silence, but she does
For only in those moments did she begin to appreciate his handicraft.
She found no words for the weight of the level, the smell of the sawdust,
the symphony of man and machine,
the geometry of a not quite finished home, the callused hands that held hers.

Somehow she manages the punctuation though the hammer is in his hand.
She holds the nails coyly, is the stop-and-go-light of this building process.

What he doesn’t know is how she watches him out to the shed at night,
he with purpose, maybe meaning; she looking only in the direction
that language points, but never far enough to explain anything.

To him every corner is a perfect fragrant flower, to her a rhetorical game.
Love is whole, warm, a spiral, not threatening, an answer.
She has but questions, questions, splintered ends of veins of tangents,
dead leaves.

But she lets him love her and shelter her.
And he listens attentively, ensconced between her words.