or drive a batch of penny nails
without a twinge of sheepishness.
But the spirit level
is another story: so ingenious
in the essence of its utility
that it's practically child's play.
Yours was as long as your arm:
a perfect ersatz shotgun for a boy
like me. But stealing downstairs
first thing Sunday mornings, bent on infiltrating
your cluttered basement sanctum,
I found it more ingratiating
for what it was, for how it wedded
simple premise and ample mystery.
Winking in their tubes
of tinted glass, those emerald bubbles
never burst or vanished,
no matter how furiously I shook them up
or how cagily I aimed
to tilt and drown them.
It
seemed to me
there had to be some clever dodge
concealed in its sundry uses , like umbrellas
that sheath a hidden sword
or the dining table's folded wings.
Still, what artfulness I grasped
held
all
the thrill of minor sorcery:
the fingernail flecks of nervous air
that performed my bidding faithfully,
the flickering means to divine
absolute vertical, true horizontal, the rightful
cut of angles. Did I ever tell you
the basement floor sloped faintly, here
and there, the windowsills betrayed
a slant? Did I tell you how the doorframes
would make the bubble tremble,
as if the house were slowly beginning
to sink down on one knee?
