Connoisseur of Chaos

Violent order

On Friday mornings, I get up early to wash teaspoons.

At the place where I wash teaspoons, is a small scullery whose window looks into a covered courtyard. It has never been open before, but last Friday it was.

Behind the scenes PHOTO: Karin Schimke

‘A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.’

Wallace Stevens wrote these as the opening lines to his poem ‘A Connoisseur of Chaos’. Those lines form the epigraph of a poem of mine published in Navigate, a poetry collection I released in 2017.

The immigrant's collections*

A collector collects for the love of the thing. 
Apparently he loves empty glass jars
and empty buckets of HTH pool chlorine
and rusted nuts and bolts and screws 
and trowels and hammers and nail clippers
and blunt scissors and hose attachment
and nozzles and empty boxes of
chronic medication for hypertension.

*

The smoky murk of the workshop: 
slabs of wood resting on steel drawers
brought home from the factory. Food cans
set on surfaces, up against the walls, beneath
shelves on brackets he had made, sprouting 
brushes and sharp things, queuing like a row
of steampunk porcupines. The crazy 
organised trays. Earless cups with cable ties.
Envelopes marked in his spikey script
with the names of seeds on them.
Slide boxes with tacks. Cutlery trays of screws. 

*

The trick to borrowing something without asking
was to value each cog in this violent order equally.
Then you marked the places and returned
what you'd borrowed precisely. Before 6pm. 

My father’s workshop was nothing like what I saw through the opening under that tilted window. My father’s realm was ordered. My father’s realm was violent.