WRITE THE WORLD REVIEW ARCHIVE

It began at the beginning in the middle of things;
at the center of the galaxy, in the middle
of a lollipop, at a mall parking lot: a spiral,
going up, coming down, round and round
around a silent axis, standing statue still,
where the world condensed before bursting out.

From a dot so minute, it grew out,
left bigger things for much smaller things,
curved the color of your eyes into helical strands; still
unsatisfied, searching for a nucleus, another middle,
another core, another axis, to wind ’round,
promise another straight line and draw another spiral.

It wrote itself in poems and stories in spiral
-bound notebooks of kisses and dreams and out
-of-place feelings and untamed curls tangled round
faces; growing up and not knowing things,
and bowls of spiral pasta in the middle
of the night when the city lights are still.

It bloomed flowers with divine proportion, still
nights giving way to rosy buds, blossoming golden-spiral
petals soft under the sun, whirling out from the middle;
then it dived into oceans and waters, mapping out
the path how the water drained the sink, left things
in hurricanes and whirlpools, spinning round and round.

It danced into sunsets, twirling in pirouettes round
the corner, where the snails with their curled shells still
made their way past the tendrils holding onto things;
and it frightened a million millipedes into a fearful spiral,
ran down the Loretto's twisting stairs and made out
with the yellow sunflowers, drawing circles in their middle.

It ate coffee swirls and swiss rolls for tea in the middle
of January, when the weather outside brought round
after round of harsh and bitter winds that left out
triangles for circles, left beelines for detours, still
swirling the brushstrokes of The Starry Night into spiral
clouds; even now, coiling another hundred things.

At last, it went out, with an artist, got lost in the middle
of life, felt things so roundly till the world spun ’round
a still thought and died in a poem, set in a spiral.