Kitchen Sink (everthing and the)

If I owned time (ran its manufacturing plant),

my days would span the Grand Canyon. I’d put away

these lines, stop straightening the world into boxed

sense. I’d sleep half the time, let dreams dominate

my days. Awake, I’d wash dishes after a banquet.

I’d wash and I’d wash. Washing the task I’d find

born to do.  The quiet clank and occasional clatter,

the warm soapy water under my bare hands,

reaching for the forks at the sink’s ceramic

bottom. I am a diver, finding in the dark what only

the dark should know. But now I know: the cheese

stuck between tines, the lettuce fragment that missed

scraping and compost, and finally, my hands swooping

again and again, searching for another dish, a missing

piece of ware to wash before it’s time to rest again.

And when I dream, I dream I’m washing dishes.

But in the dream, the dishes aren’t dishes, they’re

rabbits. The rabbits talk and feed us. They use spoons

that their dishwashing rabbits gather after meals

and clean in a tiny basin back in their rabbit hole.

The rabbits, though, need our care. They fit in the palm of my

hand. I have to be careful not to break, lose or drown

the rabbits. I kneel before the bowl I use as sink, then set

the first small rabbit out to dry, on the grass. He hops away.

I wash another and another, until I am wakened by the clink

of a dish, my feet aching with pleasure from standing

and washing and washing hundreds of dishes in my kitchen sink.