Reordering

The floors are swept, arduous task
On crutches. That tiny delight
In accomplishing housekeeping,

That satisfying little fix,
Reminds you life is maintenance,
Down to the cellular level

And at all levels in between,
The skeleton, the digestion,
The exhausted nervous system.

It goes up, as well, beyond life,
Into systems life generates
That are never themselves alive,

Termite mounds, beehives, beaver dens.
When whole civilizations fail,
It’s sheer failure of maintenance.

Then the little lives maintaining
Themselves as best they can visit
Ruins to compose poetry,

Lines about wild foxes denning
In the emperor’s palace grounds,
Winds blowing through fallen towers.

Broom set aside, sitting back down
To admire your swept floors, bones still
Aching, old flesh, you imagine

That every level of living,
Down to the single cells, deserves
Its own ubi sunt poetry—

Not just lost civilizations,
Lost revolutions, friendships, youth,
But any lost, collapsed system

That, for a while, busied itself
With the fight against entropy
And, for that while, reordered things.