Scrabbled Reveries: a poem

Years ago, I used to write poems on a regular basis. The following poem—a playful exercise in anagrams—is one I wrote for a poetry writing class at Wheaton College in 2003.


Scrabbled Reveries

She opens the board and the room disappears.
The cascade of wooden squares eclipses
empty loveseats, unwashed coffee mugs,
Sunday newspapers stacked
unread except for completed crosswords
and cluttered wordfinds. As she empties
the loosened pouch, she does not see
scattered A’s or lonely S’s, nor
does she watch each piece fall with casual
distance. Instead, a stray BLUE ANT
crawls across the ABLUENT detergent,
and the long LINE of HAY stacks
stands opposed to the HYALINE sky.
The tall QAT with its PURE leaves
rests quietly on the kitchen PARQUET,
while the intricate woodwork is covered
with popcorn kernels. The room
in which she SITS surrounded by a RACY
matrix of letters becomes her SACRISTY,
replete with the necessary game-playing
vessels of box and board. She comes dressed
in the official vestments of sweatpants
and T-shirt, discolored by spilled snacks,
the marks of a long tradition. Her eyes, gamboling
between letters, BITE off EDENIC morsels
after offering the BENEDICITE in the advent
of anagrams. Sitting quietly at the table,
her mind dresses each word in a raiment of flesh.
Words become her companions. At last, she feasts
on her Last Supper of triple-word-scores
and eight-letter bingos, and in the emptiness
of night, she revels in her power to bring
the order of language to a chaos of squares.

—D. W. Congdon, 4/15/03