Poem-A-Day: Proximity by Randall Mann

Proximity   by Randall Mann     Out of the fog comes a little white bus. It ferries us south to the technical mouth of the bay. This is biopharma, Double Helix Way. In the gleaming canteen, mugs have been dutifully stacked for our dismantling, a form of punishment. Executives take the same elevator as I. This one's chatty, that one's gravely engrossed in his cloud. Proximity measures shame. I manage in an office, but an office that faces a hallway, not the bay. One day I hope to see the bay that way. It all began in the open, a cubicle--there's movement. My door is always open, even when I shut it. I sit seven boxes below the CEO on the org chart. It's an art, the value-add, the compound noun. Calendar is a verb. To your point, the kindest prepositional phrase. Leafy trees grow a short walk from Building 5. Take a walk. It might be nice to lie and watch the smoky marrow rise and fall, and rise. Don't shut your eyes.         Copyright © 2013 by Randall Mann. Used with permission of the author.     About This Poem "I have been thinking a lot about the machinery of work--commute, hierarchy, vernacular, etc.--and wanted to integrate my often conflicting ideas about it into a poem. This poem is about several of my jobs, and, in a sense, none of them."    --Randall Mann Most Recent Book by Mann Straight Razor (Persea Books, 2013)   June 11, 2013 Randall Mann is the author  of three books of poetry including Straight Razor, forthcoming from Persea Books in October 2013. Mann lives in San Francisco. Related Poems Engines Within the Throne by Cathy Park Hong I am the People, the Mob by Carl Sandburg The Telephonist by Susan Yuzna Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on  weekdays and classic poems  on weekends. Browse the  Poem-A-Day Archive.         Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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