BACK TO SCHOOL 

Poem for Today - August 16, 2014

A  LESSON  IN  HANDWRITING 

Try first this figure 2,

how, from the point of the pen,

clockwise it unwinds itself

downward to the line,

making itself a pedestal to stand on.

Watch now. Before your eyes it becomes a swan

drifting across the page, its neck so carefully

poised, its inky eye

lowered in modesty.

As you continue, soon,

between the thin blue lines,

swan after swan sails beautifully past you,

margin to margin, 2 by 2 by 2—

a handwritten swirl of swans.

Under them now unroll

the soft, curled pillows of the 6's,

the acrobatic 3's, the angular 7's,

the hourglass 8's, and the neat tadpole 9's,

each passing in review

on stilts or wheels or platforms

in copybook order.

Turn the page, for now

comes the alphabet, an eccentric

parade of odd characters. If at first you tangle,

now and again, in a loop or a twirl,

no matter. Each in time will dawn

as faces and animals do, familiar,

laughable, crooked, quirky.

Begin with the letter S. Already

it twists away from the pen like a snake or a watch spring,

coiled up and back to strike. SSSS, it says,

hissing and slithering off into the ferns of the F’s.

Follows a line of stately Q's floating

just off the ground, tethered by their tails,

over the folded arms of the W's

and the akimbo M's. Open-eyed, the O's

roll after them like bubbles blown away.

Feel how the point curls round them lovingly

after the serious three-tongued E's.

See now how the page fills up

with all the furniture of writing—the armchair H’s,

the ladders and trestles of A's and Y's and X's,

the T-shaped tables and the upholstered B's.

The pen abandons a whole scaffolding

of struts and braces, springs and balances,

on which will rest eventually

the weight of a written world, storey on storey

of words and vows, all the long-drawn-out telling

that pens become repositories of.

These are now your care, and you may give them

whatever slant or human twist you wish

if it should please you. But you will not alter

their scrawled authority, durable

as stone, silent, grave, oblivious

of all you make them tell.

Tomorrow, words begin.

© Alastair Reid

Pages 381-382

In The New Yorker

Book of Poems,

Selected by the Editors

Of the New Yorker,

Morrow Quill Paperbacks,

New York, 1974