Elegy for the Writer

The desk has become a tideline

of what was once a shore.

📜🖋

The jars of ink have hardened into obsidian,

their depths no longer stirred

by the frantic search for a beginning.

📜🖋

He was a man who inhabited

the narrow space

between a thought and the first black stroke,

a tenant of the white margin,

always turning into the wind of a sentence

to see where the vowels might scatter.

📜🖋

Loss did not manifest with a roar.

It was a slow unspooling,

a gradual thinning of the paper,

until his handwriting became a ghost

of its former strength,

the loops of the letters stretching

as if reaching for a meaning

that kept drifting just past the edge of the wood.

📜🖋

The absence shows up in the objects left behind:

the stack of yellowing legal pads,

the brass paperweight

that no longer has anything to hold.

📜🖋

The stillness in this room is full of the things

he started but never released,

a thousand unfinished bridges

built toward a land he could no longer see.

📜🖋

He lived for the friction of the mind

against the flat, unyielding field.

He knew the precise pull of a noun,

how a single word could anchor a memory

or set a whole life adrift.

📜🖋

Now the meter of his heart

has finally untethered from the line.

The metaphors have unhooked their claws,

and the adjectives have let go of their colors.

📜🖋

There is no longer a need for the scratching of the metal,

the desperate hunt

for the exact curve of an 'S'

or the sharp tug of a 'T.'

📜🖋

What remains is the trace of the effort.

It sits in the indentation left on the blotter,

a faint map of a journey through the night.

📜🖋

The poem he was always writing

has finally reached its perfect state,

a clarity that requires no ink,

a music that needs no ear to be heard.

📜🖋

He has become the very thing

he spent a lifetime trying to describe:

the wide, unprinted space,

the hush that is not empty,

the light that stays after the lamp is gone.