My daughter likes to pick up scraps from the floor of the art room at her school.
She brought home a brown puff ball she had tied to a leash of blue ribbon.
“Look, I made this,” she announced, holding it up like a pocket watch
she was using to hypnotize me.
Since then I’ve found it wound around drawer pulls,
binding the salt and pepper shakers,
dangling from the hammock.
Now it’s lying on the kitchen island, unused.
Yes, an object like that can be used.
A thing can be used
and used and used;
I learned that, being a mother.
As I stirred the pasta for dinner I used my finger to curl the ribbon into a spiral.
I thought of Yeats’ widening gyre;
that was a baleful unwinding.
This was a playful coiling.
Both spirals are made of words,
words which we reuse constantly,
words which are made of letters,
letters which we reuse constantly,
endlessly composing from one long string of letters,
one long, nonsensical string.
We must create order from that thing.
The pressure to make an easily-recognizable order is tremendous.
Otherwise the words cannot knot us,
cannot assuage our aloneness,
and considering it’s just scraps we’re working with—
the same scraps, over and over—
it’s a miracle anyone ever composes
an unusual thought.
The pasta water boils over.
My daughter’s assemblage on its tour of our home
is part of the cosmic order,
like a cluster of stars gliding in formation,
or like a star gone rogue, a shooting star with a tail-string—
though the cosmic order is so great that there is no real going rogue from it.
Everything is contained in it and everything in it can be made
explainable, eventually.
Like how any old word, even scrap, or gyre,
can be sung,
and a word that is sung can dangle in the air
and a person putting old words into a new order
can once in awhile hypnotize,
and seem, inexplicably, free.
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