A World to Do
“I busy too,” the little boy
said, lost in his book
about a little boy, lost
in his book, with nothing
but a purple crayon
and his wits to get him out.
“Nobody can sit with me,
I have no room.
I busy
too. So don’t do any noise.
We don’t want any noise
right now.”
He leafs
through once, leafs twice;
the pictures, mixed with windy
sighs, grow dizzy,
world
as difficult, high-drifting
as the two-day snow that can
not stop.
How will the bushes,
sinking deeper and deeper,
trees and birds, wrapt
up, ever creep
out again?
Any minute now the blizzard,
scared and wild, the animals
lost in it—O the fur,
the red-eyed claws, crying
for their home—may burst
into the room. Try words
he’s almost learned
on them?
He sighs, “I need a man here;
I can’t do all this work
alone.”
And still, as though
intent on reading its own
argument, winter continues
thumbing through itself.
Copyright Credit: Theodore Weiss, “A World to Do” from Selected Poems, published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by Theodore Weiss. All rights reserved; reprinted with the permission of Northwestern University Press, www.nupress.northwestern.edu.
Source: Selected Poems (1995)