-navigating the "Arts" section-

In the beginning, God created the Apple and the Earth

1.
In this morning's "Arts" section, there’s a photo
accompanying an article of a young, smiling
Maxine Kumin sitting at her typewriter, and

she’s turned slightly in her chair to face the camera.

It's not the art of photography.
The shutter speed's factory preset is good enough.

I like Maxine Kumin. I read her poems.
I’ve paid money for her books.

The spines are well defined on the shelf;
Maxine in a row, but in no definitive order. 

It’s the typewriter at her desk

which got me to thinking about Maxine,

typewriting poems in her earlier days (not so long ago)
and how easy it was for me as I began to think about poems,
sitting at the luminous screen of God's anointed machine

as it defines proper grammar and corrects misspelling while
I tap its keys, giving me a head's-up option underlined in red.
It's a fast machine. It's a time machine.

Time machine, don't make me lazy:

2.
Yesterday, it ushered me into Charles Bukowski's
cold-water flat in SanFrancisco.
There's Charles at the fridge, beer bottle in hand, a woman
escorted from the bar who's been around the block at his side.

It didn't matter that Charles would've taken offense
at the rudeness of the intrusion.

Time machine, don't make me crazy: 

The slick apparatus has given us an open door
to more efficiently covet our neighbor's goods.
It's like getting a free pass to bypass the 10th commandment.

But eventually poems come out of it just as they did

from the young Maxine Kumin's typewriter, and of those

before her time and long before that, whatever the machinery at hand,

even to the age of the crow-feathered quill.

Acknowledgment:

 John Copley, if you're among the living, I've altered your "Crow Quill" phrase!

epilog:

I hear-tell one could go blind writing nightly by candlelight.

christ, according to past confessionals, I'd have to abuse myself

one hundred sixty-eight more times before I'd go blind.