PUT IT
IN WRITING
Poem for Today - Tuesday - September 16, 2014
WRITING
The cursive crawl,
the squared-off characters,
these by
themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a
foreign language, in
Chinese, for
instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the
lake scoring their white
records in ice.
Being intelligible,
these winding ways
with their audacities
and delicate
hesitations, they become
miraculous, so
intimately—out there
at the pen's point
or brush's tip - do world
and spirit wed.
The small bones of the wrist
balance against
great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind
bat surveys his way
by echo alone.
Still, the point of style
is character. The
universe induces
a different tremor
in every hand, from the
check forger's to
that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who
called his own calligraphy
the "Slender
Gold." A nervous man
writes nervously
of a nervous world, and so on.
Miraculous. It is
as though the world
were a great
writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there
is more to the world
than writing; continental
faults are not
bare convoluted
fissures in the brain.
Not only must the
skaters soon go home;
also the hard
inscription of their skates
is scored across
the open water, which long
remembers nothing,
neither wind nor wake.
© Howard Nemerov
The New Yorker Book of Poems,
pages 816-817
No comments:
Post a Comment