For C.M.

The high plains desert butte that serves as my desk
Awaits a sunset to match this Monday’s sunrise
Of Cyclops – the name I call my computer screen.
The incarcerations and liberties of envelopes clutter
The silence, overcrowded as any Sing Sing orRiker’s Island.
The inky indictment of pens and leaden assumptions
Of pencils stick their fatal shafts and quills

Into a coffee-cup drained of life some time
In the flux between the Business section and Personal.
My keyboard arrays its slightly raised runes
To proffer the potential poetry of a profit margin
Lurking behind the chime of the market bell,
Unread as piles of stock reports, pensees
Of profit, dividend arias, and litanies of loss.

And the smell of perfume hangs past morning –
Your perfume, White Linen, wafting its assaults
Over my cubicle, mystic in its ambush
(Though you won’t know it perhaps until much later).
You announce routine military exercises along the border,
And with hosiery’s hush you’ll cross and uncross your legs
A thousand times each day. I count them all.

The keyboard’s furrowed grey chiclets, trim and zen
As pebbles in a Buddhist garden,
Please the fingers combing for figurative gems.
A squared layer of snowfall, sheets of vellum
Rest on the office stationery shelf.
The space bar’s staccato hammer threatens to dislodge them
Like dynamite whiting out mountain slopes

To inoculate them against avalanche and ice dam.
An American-made paper clip’s early
Immortality is twisted awry by
The diplomacy of our last phone conversation –
The mangled silver wire sits by the wall jack, a futile
Inchworm of outstretched steel, a snarling cork-screw.
It gathers nothing now, collects nothing, holds nothing.

Papers fall apart. Reports cannot hold.
The stapler and tape dispenser are moved
Into defensive positions behind
The plastic-armored computer tower. The rapid fire
Of a rear-guard memorandum (“Re: Us”)
Dares me to a pre-emptive strike against mergers
That would delete my nerve and put us back together again.