Poem VII · Free verse · 2022
I Wish, 9
How I wish that
like these lips
poetry were soft
and true,
and like this voice
sound and full.
I wish to write
the drunken kiss
of your eyes
into my dark marks.
Yet I hear only
the glassy murmur
of the lead
upon my pages,
in place of the tender whispers
of your thoughts
in my ears.
Author's note
The engine of the text is an absence that takes bodily form: lips, eyes, voice. Against this longed-for concreteness stands, by synesthesia, the abstraction of writing: poetry would like to become soft and full, the ink marks would like to hold the heady intensity of a gaze. But the substitution does not hold. The author longs for the physical nearness of the beloved, something the page cannot offer, and comes to mock his own medium: the "glassy murmur of the lead" is a dry, sterile sound, far from the whispers (tender, though not necessarily innocent) he would wish to receive. Poetry, here, confesses its own insufficiency.