diorama  

with the same impulse
that Noah built a great wooden
arc i've started making 
a diorama of a one-room school house
this is where i will move to
if i get too small for 
the real world, i imagine
waking up one day as tall
as a pen. i collect coins 
& pine cones,
setting up match boxes
for desks & a chalk board 
where i'll write the date
desks in rows as if
they were planted 
by a farmer. desks turning
into plants, tomato vines 
& soybeans, there were
all sorts of school houses
floating in the midst 
of the fields where i grew
up & i wanted to crawl
in through the windows
& live there, become
a nice match box,
listen to the laughter
of wind playing tag 
in tall corn,
when my house floods 
over i will have this
diorama, 
all the detail, 
the care it takes to
make everything smaller,
have you ever tried
to build a model?
i have, i left them all unfinished
on a table upstairs,
a half-painted titanic 
& a biplane with one wing,
maybe i'll put them 
in the diorama too,
just for safe keeping,
what i haven't decide yet
is what people will belong
inside, taking handfuls
of ants to make the school children,
crawling on the shoe box walls,
on their desks, what misbehavior,
did god do this? feel like this
about his animals? all over
the place, i will be 
a pen, tall & full of blue ink,
all this life i'll write
on the classroom walls,
i'll look out the window 
& see the seasons swimming past
each other, summer with
its six legs, autumn:
the shell of a peanut,
winter: a rolling blueberry,
spring: pink eraser
i take the school house
& i dump it in the lawn 
to start over, i need
it to be perfect,
i ask the ants
what they'll want
to be when they grow up,
but they just scatter,
i wonder about
the real school houses
if anyone ever crawls
in through the windows
lays on the cool floor,
listens to the seasons whirl