The Sum of All Wonder

Today's prompt led us to think of all of the associations that surround a word. 

from Jane Hirshfield's Nine Gates

"every good poem begins in language awake to its own connections--language that hears itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and knows perhaps even more than we do about who and what we are" (3).

 

Here is my draft:

The Sum of All Wonder

Old words contain an archive of themselves;
A shoebox sized diorama: with a paper
sea that covers strong currents,  and a few
rotting hulls of lost ships.  Where a white-washed
house sits banished on a hillside in the distance.
It’s basement packed with soggy cardboard
and the spidery veins of mildews’ secrets.
And somewhere, in the foreground,  is a crooked
pine straggling on a rock cliff, but is pulled back
from sorrow’s lean by a steady arm of wind.
And underneath, all of this: the paper sea,
the white-washed house, the terrible leaning pine,
tiny ladders reach down from the risk of edge
to connect what is now, to what has been left behind.