Poems About Work: Desk Job, Carla Galdo

Desk Job

I cleaned my desk today, removed the stacks
of newsletters, receipts, and doctor’s bills.
With rag in hand, I made a few attacks
on dried-up evidence of coffee spills. 
 
I shelved the books—they’d sprouted up again 
in leaning towers inked with potencies
on deckled gills, like mushrooms after rain.
I opened wide the curtains so the breeze
 
could run its vigor through the room, and sweep
away the stagnant air, and clear my mind,
where sins lie in their jumbled, grubby heap—
some known, confessed, and some not yet defined.
 
I scrubbed the wooden window sills, the grime,
the carcasses of flies who met their end
short of the inaccessible sublime.
Why must we beat our heads like them, why spend                                     
 
our days in fruitless wrangling with the wiles                                              
of creeping entropy? We work. Time blurs.
We tend our messy lives, battering like exiles
ourselves, against translucent barriers.