Jacob Sheetz-Willard

First Principles

You start from the top down, clearing dust
from the tank lid, then draw your torn
bath towel over the flush handle, across 
the tank’s vertical expanse of porcelain,
the lid, the seat, the bowl’s yawning O, 
descending to the bolt clamps and tapered
surface at the back; work with gravity 
is what I’m saying, let gravity do the dirty
work so to speak, which is the modus 
of pipes and municipal water systems since 
at least ancient Rome: Claudius, Quintus, 
and Scipio laboring under the Etruscan sun, 
stacking stones for the empire’s aqueducts 
while uncle Gaius wheels by on a sleek horse cart
cut from rare wood, which is most certainly 
compensating for whatever’s tucked 
inside his linen tunic; consider this toilet, 
as you polish the stop valve and chrome 
escutcheon, an incarnation of Platonic
ideality, a material referent to first
principles in the management of waste–
out of sight, out of mind, refined and
reintroduced into the ecosystem: nitrogen,
phosphorus, potassium upcycled into
ailanthus and forget-me-nots; one thing,
that is, leads invariably to another and so
you can’t help marveling at the chain’s action,
how it reminds you of medieval woodcuts
(prime mover upstairs instructing angels 
and cherubim, not a man, mollusk, or mineral 
overlooked or lost in the grand unfolding)
which now, yes, seem hopelessly incongruous 
with what you know of mass and relativity,
synaptic networks and Jungian analysis,
but remember how your education failed
(it did!) to prepare you for the local intimacy 
of this particular base plate’s chipped glaze, or 
how the glowing template of grief has looked 
different when reflected back in grief’s lesser 
forms, as when a little boy delivers ash to water
and sends his first loved, now unrecognizable
pet swirling into the afterlife. Forgive him if 
the old hymns don’t come to mind. Forgive him
if he doesn’t once remember stories of the River 
Styx. He thinks instead of shit as a plain fact,
lower case and all around, there to be shoveled, 
flushed, forgotten, or sent somewhere else,
the cruel certainty of it, as real as the ruined
civic architecture in his world history textbook,
(battered spine, stained pages) the one
he goes through each night, erasing 
penciled notes in the margin–Jenny Holcomb 
Loves Alan Dodd, Principal Parker’s 
got a tiny prick–to keep it clean, to imagine 
how it might have looked, like all things, at first, 
before the petty human mess and intrusion.

Jacob Sheetz-Willard is a poet from Leadville, Colorado and an MFA graduate of the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His work has appeared in Chestnut Review, Narrative, North American Review, Permafrost, and elsewhere. He teaches literature and leads wilderness expeditions in the American West.