Lat time I was at Squaw Valley Community of Writers I discovered that there was another poet not just from my very small town, but who lives on my short block, seven or eight houses down from me. How lucky!
Here is one of her poems:
Discussing Useful Life at the Tax Depreciation Seminar
While Remembering a Line by David Baker
The depreciable life of a parking garage is fifteen, unless its roof
is the floor of the building above it, in which case it’s thirty-nine.
Office furniture is seven, the stove five and the fax machine five.
But if a machine has its wires embedded in the wall behind it,
so they ease through the wall like veins, it can make that wall part
of the machine, thus five, as if there’s a contagion there, a life-changing
symbiosis, one function conspiring with the other, because they’re
too close to be segregated, like the heart feeding its blue canals,
or the way the lungs recycle the breath, the breath intangible,
and therefore amortized, whereas eyes, attached by a nerve,
can be pulled out from the skull like a stove from the wall,
though vision seems to take place outside the body, as if eyes
are really windows of the soul—windows, thirty-nine, but twenty-seven
and a half if residential. Which makes sense because some days
we’re an office, some days a home, but this moment I’m looking
out the window, distracted by a bee working a cherry blossom
as it wobbles in the March wind. Ah, working—that tree is an office
—thirty-nine, and those bees Descartes would call soulless machines
are five years, like all soulless machines—but look at the way the bee
moves her body, synchronizing with the tremble of the blossom
as it shakes from a wind that soon will tear each white bud away
from its branch, just as I will leave from a garage whose roof is both roof
and floor. There is nothing that does not connect and so sustain.
I feel my hand raising up. How many years, I ask, is the wind?
Jeanne Wagner
from The Genesis Machine