My Walk to Work

From the door of my apartment building to the door of my office building measures one mile, almost exactly, and I walk it nearly every day.  As I silently walk (no iPod, no cell phone), my mind often starts making sentences--but alas, just about the time it gets churning, I'm at my building, and it's time to buckle down and get to work teaching, going to committee meetings, and so on. 

On my way to work yesterday, two poems emerged in my head, most emphatically not like Wallace Stevens's, but very much (as you will see) about my reluctance to get to campus.  For something different, I thought I'd just fling them up here, just for fun, unrevised and unpolished.  The first one alludes to the fairy tale "Cinderella," and the second one reaches all the way back to when I was an undergraduate, and depends on a misremembering of some lines from Richard Wilbur's poem "Epistemology." 

I also appear to have been quite partial to the oo-sound yesterday. 

Oh, the sweet soft parts of self I've lopped
to stuff me inside the academy's shoe.
I am the unfit sister, sawing her flesh,
and the dove who follows the blood trail,
cooing the truth.

We milk the cow of the world
and as we do
we say to her
you are not true,
read the sign on my advisor's door.
I don't, I thought.  I lie
beneath the world cow's curves:
happy, drinking, crying Moo.