Tangled Rope

It’s no fun to make excuses, to claim biographical distance from a poem, but I do so here (as I often feel I must) to make it clear this is no confessional:

"Repair"

A blue tear of electricity flashes from the outlet;
I'm only plugging in the oscillating fan,
but this reminds me of the passion
I suspect still glows inside you.

And there in the library's bindery,
alone in a closed-off workroom
the steamer reminds me of sweat we have made,
years ago when love was fresh.
But now we are like this brittle spine,
this split horse glue.

And yet I dream (as the steam reactivates
the amber, lustrous, waxy seam)
of love reversible:
bound in the old way,
though cracked, the break is clean,
is easily repaired when pressed together,
when soft, when hot again,
as it was at first.

Knowing what I must do, what I came to accomplish,
with a putty knife I scrape the glue,
mixing it with the unprotected pages' dust,
stirring in the passive dirt
that sifts down on all that are shelved,
reanimating corpse germs of others' coughs.
So gold turns to gray.

Soon the smell overcomes me;
I bolt for the door;
The electric fan that I relied on
can not make dead things fresh again.

The end of the third stanza was:

So gold turns gray,
as the sexterns are made clean.

A sextern is a particular kind of (typically stitched) section, consisting of six bifolios. I chose to use it originally because it provides some balance to the image of dirtied glue, while providing what I thought was a relatively mild double entendre. Apparently there’s a more modern use of the word “sextern”, and that coupled with the ambiguity and additive nature, I decided to cut it.