DISSERTATION

I have been cleaning my home office ("handle everything once") and came across a bundle of abandoned poems from some years ago. Here's one --

DISSERTATION

Mornings I woke early,
put on coffee, brushed
my teeth, then sat
down, my hands on the keyboard.
The computer was crammed
behind the living room couch.
If I was lucky, the words
fluttered and sang.
If the words did not come
I worked on an odd paragraph,
hammering it against the rock
of its own meaning until
it burst and released a morsel
of truth. The openings
of chapters became very fine,
then overwrought. The sun rose
and the household (husband
and daughters) slowly awoke.
Now when I look back
over those pages and pages
I finally know that what I was doing
wasn't writing, not
in any mere sense of writing.
I was struggling with the word.
And I still struggle to know it,
the word that was in the beginning,
in the world's morning,
and was good.