for a prompt for beginning a poem

for a prompt for beginning a poem,

I opened the dictionary randomly

and scanned fast until I’d found

the first word I didn’t know,

and this was it, right in the middle

of the middle column: “minuend.”

it’s pronounced “minyuh, wend”

and it means (according to the 2010

new oxford american dictionary)

“a quantity or number from which

another is to be subtracted.”

at first glance, you might have thought

it’d be pronounced like its neighbor

“minuet,” but that word, of course,

is french, whereas “minuend” derives

from the latin word for “diminish.”

now I have to do the opposite of all this:

close the dictionary of life and drive off

to do the kind of things it takes no looking up

to get done―library, post office, and so on―

but I’m a finger too, even as I go,

moving toward someone else’s unknown

and the beginning of whatever constitutes

a poem for them.