March 30, 2025Executive Orders
Who, in a back room, prepares the folders? The ones
that look like menus from ’80s family restaurants.
In the office, there’s always a person, let’s be honest,
a woman, who procures the staff birthday cards
then devises a way to circulate them—in a binder, a folder,
within a pad of paper—for discreet signing by fellow
workers. Does the executive-order-folder-preparing-
woman take care of the White House birthday cards
too? I wonder. May I take your order? Does she
say that before whisking the folders off
to the Office of the Federal Register to be given
a sequential number?
In today’s New York Times photo, just one folder lies
open on the high gloss of the Resolute Desk. Oak
rests below the thick polish. Timbers taken from the British
ship that shares the desk’s name. Earlier NYT photos
showed folders in stacks, like at a hostess station
where families wait to be taken to a table. I remember
those months too, when there were so many birthday
cards to sign at work that eventually I just signed
my name without much thought for whom it was for
or what anyone else wrote. I’d grab a juicy, inky
marker, like a Sharpie, and use my time to form every
letter in my name, as if that were the gesture, as if
that were the work. I learned recently of an English
ancestor on my dad’s side, who mastered his art of making
wooden bowls. That’s what he learned to do in life,
so that’s what he did. He turned wooden bowls
with a pole lathe. Elm mostly. I read he didn’t concern
himself much with what happened to them
after he’d made them. I once found a photo of him
in his work shed in an archive online. He and his lathe
in a murky light. Behind him, tower after teetering tower
of empty wooden bowls.
from Poets Respond