Rules of Thumb

1
There is no such thing as an idle rumor:
it festoons itself with ribbons, spurs,
then buckles its belt and gets to work.
Or it travels the air, an invisible rope,
then ties knots in people's throats.
It lassos the proud in mid-run,
knocking them down to the ground.
It can lay low the mighty in a day,
raise the obscure to brief infamy.
The only feat it can't complete is,
as yet, unheard of.

2
Nobody loves moralists,
least of all their mothers, who
at birth, noticed how often
their babes turned away
from their naked nipples
which were taut as buttons
on elevator doors.
Nobody loves moralists
despite the fact that they
shook their fingers at their fathers
when their fathers went off to wars.
Nobody loves moralists, least of all
the moralists themselves, who
for all their stern objections,
know that moralists are bores.

3
Stones cannot be tamed,
but men can be broken like mules,
and emptied of their souls.
What can we do to stop ourselves
from growing into headless nails?
We must be blind again, be deaf,
be dumb, be unborn again and again.

4
God, put a pox on every money box
that isn't mine. At the end
of the month the bills rush in
like a flock of paper pigeons
with sharp talons, stools
that burn holes in all the linen.
The bills are building a monument
of shit, and daily I must climb it.
God, put a pox on every money box
that isn't mine, or else
reinvent the clock.

5
The rules of thumb are double-jointed,
but the rules of fingers are single-minded.
The index finger points away from the I,
as the middle finger flips off the Other.
Ring finger, caught as it is around the waist,
doesn't bother with distinctions; it's wed
to the ring finger of its brother.
Only the pinkie knows what the pinkie's for:
tiny oar, it pinpoints the stars.

*Maurya Simon is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including Ghost Orchid, which was nominated in 2004 for a National Book Award in Poetry. Her book of ekphrastic poems, WEAVERS, was published in 2006 by Blackbird Press, and another volume, The Mapmaker’s Art, will be issued this autumn by Red Hen Press. Simon is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in poetry, an Artist’s Residency at the American Academy in Rome, and an Indo-American Fulbright Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside and lives in the Angeles National Forest in Southern California.