GraphiteA Poem by VHI found your letter on the back of a framed photograph, one you gave me years ago, when we hung from the window of your third story flat as if we might topple into the gray streets. You wrote it in your sprawling curlicues of graphite, words with edges smooth like skin from a dull pencil tip. My fingers graze the drunk lines lightly, smudging your words that whisper the way memories do. The squib of my pen finds your words, slippery like the surface of my photo paper, and makes permanent what you made only temporary. The wet ink looks slimy, it slithers over your hissing S’s and rides the humps of your M’s, pins your vowels into submission, pinned to the paper for good. It is beautiful that my wrist rolls, now rests in the same place yours once did as my pen traces, traces the elusive gray that writhes and meanders along the page, and I wish we could hold hands as I caress your curves- why do your letters sprawl with forces of repulsion between your “w” and “e?”- and I see we run out of space, you and I, on the paper, and you have no more words. I lift my pen but my wrist lingers, hungry for contact, resting on your dangling words, dangling like we once did. A drop of rich obsidian ink drips from the pen, a final punctuation mark that leaves me unsatisfied. © 2010 VH |
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Added on June 4, 2010Last Updated on June 4, 2010 Author
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