Improv 1, Week 10

Go To Your Room, Pantoum
--Kathy Fagan

My room is in Angers, France.
A rind grows around it.
A bear sleeps under the window.
My room is in Grandioser, Illinois,

The painted Desert, Arizona,
Big Savage Mountain, USA.
I have a runaway truck ramp
In that room, I have plenty

Of local color. My room is in
Caliban, Mass., Indigo, Japan,
Aporcrypha, OK. Sundays we grill
Panhandle-Hellenic, and feel the residual

Blues. Xerox the corn & you'll
Find us. Cut out the pictures of fog.
You won't get a proper pantoum
In my room, but I'll paint you

A portrait of lonely from memory:
A nest of red bees are the baby
Mice, a roof made of birds
Is the Steller's Jay laughing.

My room's on the corner of Castle
& Liberty, Wormwood & 116th.
You've seen the signs everywhere.
My room is in Angers, France.

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My daybed is five acre cornfield, not golden
but yellow. Sheets move like a forbidden lover
across a creaky floor board with popping knee.
My pillows huddle as mice, though not grey

But sequenced in ruffles of varying blues.
Some even have threads that poke
to make whiskers. Cat naps—I have plenty.
I curl the sheets into chocolate swirls

that never mix in my mug. Never understanding
500-count means that somewhere in India
a worm spun its legs for my domesticity.
I cut out the possibility of my legs tangling

in the carpet as I trek gloss eyed for tap water.
I make noises like people trying to not make noises.
You know the sounds: the laugh door hinges offer,
the rude scoff of toe on wooden chair, the flutter

of terrycloth robe as it cascades from the chair’s back.
Only in silence the robe sounds like a dying bird
crashing to a sidewalk. In India, families sleep
in the dirt, similar to flowerbeds. Tunneling as mice

would to find warm under a layer of earth.
Heavy in bird heat, if birds go into heat, the dirt
bows under the body weight of India’s children.
All spun in the sounds of silence, quiet as silk corn husks.