2000/files

Up late cleaning out files.
Articles about Native American
literature,
Silko, Harjo, the rest,
into the recycling,
what I think of
as the paper compost.
I save my favorite quotes
about story,
a few about poems.
The best of how the Hopi
have no word for time,
or place.
It is a linear,
white man’s madness,
this holding on.
Hoarding experience
in drawers,
so I can relive
what I have read,
without ceremony or blessing.
Once in the darkness
of the 4-drawer coffin,
little comes back out
until I clean and re-organize
again.
I keep thinking the struggle
is with paper,
but really it is me,
my need to hold on
to a succinct phrase,
an apt description –
not so much that, really,
as the way I felt
when I read it.

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