Roy White
DEAD LETTERS
Once the word made flesh, these books
are now flesh only, letters
grown invisible; still to me
they offer memory and touch.
Homer with his nubbly cover,
the raggedly-cut pages
unsettling as a deformity;
Chaucer's thick brick, stained with the memory
of late-night coffee and the voluptuous
expanse of those long end-notes—
the kind of good-bye I have in mind
is gonna take more space than we have here.
Today's poets are harder to distinguish, thin
and shiny and angular as
supermodels; I press a sharp
corner into my fingertip
until the pain suffices.
I do not think that they will sing to me…
But these are puppets, not corpses, awaiting
re-animation by a human voice,
The breath that came before the stylus.
Blind, I begin by calling out
like the blind Homer: "Sing, Goddess!"
Roy White's work has appeared recently in Leveler and
Neutrons/Protons, and he writes the Lippenheimer blog at
lippenheimer.wordpress.com. He Lives in Minnesota with a woman who is the
voice of poetry and a dog who just barks a lot.
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