A Return to Facts

You check out the office
for the last time, lock the door,
turn in the key and you and your
battered briefcase, two old companions,
follow the stairs and down the hall
filled with years of your steps.
You bleed a little, feel empty days
open ahead, feel somehow betrayed
by the clock tick you never thought
to hear. Strange, how the future
shrinks to a row of yesterdays.
The hell with them let them mould
their way into history— old clothes
in a ragbag. The garden metaphor
seems foolish against real earth
when you work the seedbed with
your own hands. The hoe and rake
may be more enduring friends than
the ink-fed knives carving theses
into academic shape. Now on the camp stool
you reserve for holidays, sit and watch
the real thing, the actual sprouting seed
form green rows and climbing vines.
This is a way back to your beginnings,
cultivate a field of facts until
words fall away like dry pods.