Open-Concept Plan
Jan 13 2011


I write on the dining room table.
A place I rarely dine.
And the room, more idea than place,
since I knocked down the walls
to let in the light.

So I easily forget
that this hard smooth surface
is illusion,
matter mostly empty space.
And that no matter how hard I try
to represent the world,
reality is unreliable
there is no singular view;
]just a rough simulacrum
I need to believe
is true.

Because I am only sensitive
to a limited spectrum of light,
my narrow aperture of awareness.
Because I see what catches my interest,
my memory is filtered through prejudice,
I quickly forget.
And because every time I remember
I reinvent the past.
I see the world through glass.
looking out my window
concealed by dark;
through a screen,
where faraway people
leave me indifferent, mostly,
are easily clicked-off.
Except when it feels so intense
it’s happening;
when fiction contains more truth than fact.
Even granted
that knowing is impossible.

It takes so much effort
to recognize how small I am,
to see the other as more
than body, object, obstacle.
Which is overwhelming
and inconceivable,
7 billion parallel universes
lighting-up
with pain and angst and love
all at once.

Only a supreme act of imagination
lets me escape
the trap of scale.
The tiny order of magnitude
I occupy.
My solipsistic sense
of the passage of time
in a slowly unfolding universe.
The levels of consciousness
to which I am blind,
can hardly imagine.

So it suits my purpose
to sit at this large dining room table,
with its distressed pine finish
the extra leaf, in the middle
two tall candles
patiently unlit
in the natural light
the windows permit,
and write my version of reality
distil myself into words.

Gratified that my pen
glides freely
dispenses ink,
does not penetrate the surface
of this handsome wood.


I think the meticulous detail at the end is the writer’s solution. That is, both mindfulness and living in the moment are his solution to the problems identifies earlier in the poem: the subjectivity of reality, the impossibility of knowing, and his narrow aperture of awareness. He’s effectively saying that he’s content to accept these limitations, and content to leave the mystery unexplained; choosing instead to invest fully in the version of reality he’s been given, however unreliable.

And I think what the opening does is establish this uncertainty about what’s real, since even the words he automatically uses for the most mundane things are quickly revealed to be poor approximations of objective reality.

The “open-concept plan” is an architectural metaphor for this uncertainty: that reality is constructed (in a way that’s useful for us, that makes the most “sense” – given the limitations of our senses); and that reality is more concept than fact. Perhaps “plan” here should be taken with a grain of salt, as a kind of irony. After all, what hubris to think we can plan out our lives, that we have this degree of control and predictability – irrespective of what one believes about the metaphysics of reality.