Rage for Order

I guess you could call it

a sort of sympathetic magic.

How else to explain

this obsessive reorganizing

of my home, my books, my papers,

my poems, this housekeeping

of my hard drive and floppies,

all the deleting and casting away

of redundancy and obsolescence,

dead files and moved-on addresses

and the scrubbing, the constant

scrubbing and dusting and the howl

of the protesting vacuum

that struggles to inhale

at least the 70% of house-dust

that is dead human skin

some of which might be hers.