Essay on Handwriting

After the exhibition, when packaging

the paper works for shipment in shallow 

white containers, the sculptor photographed 

my hands in labeling motions, the pen 

anxious, not meaning to pierce discrete holes 

in the foam board, a system of strictly 

useless marks. On days she taught she’d leave me 

lists on blue-lined paper I’d photograph

like tousled bed sheets. Handwriting presents 

various archival problematics, what with its 

errors, stains, tears, idiosyncrasies— 

How plausible a reader’s fictions seem 

off the inky reflective surfaces. 

Someone wearing a dark hood interrupts

my writing, traveling to New York, to say, “I 

like your scriptures,” meaning my “handwriting,”

which is illegible, resembling 

no received system. My pen doesn’t lift

between letters slanting keenly over 

the dotted line. I sit alone atop 

the staircase at the book launch, leaving room 

for couples, late arrivals. In between 

recitations accompanied by jazz,

the poet makes a case for what is lost 

in copying one’s manuscript for print. 

She prefers the poet’s page, the first draft

on a receipt, palm, or napkin carried

away by wind on which an aural trace 

may or may not remain, prefers handwriting, 

its potential transmitting of voice, voice 

as in sound, rather than the mastering

and forceful exactness of type, citing 

an early draft of the famous poem 

to which a peer added a humorous, 

scathing criticism in the margins 

reproduced in no published edition.

I scrawled questions in my notes, not looking 

at the page but at the poet who met 

my gaze as she pronounced “Herodotus”

“Parmenides,” and again with “dildo.” 

I imagined her wielding that rigid

logic in conversation over tea, 

that we’d discuss her theory of eros, 

her disdain for history and later, 

the servers inverting their chairs, she’d ask 

to hear a poem. I’d feign bashfulness, 

concede a sonnet. All that night we’d have 

spoken with our forearms on the table, 

but she would straighten then, watch my mouth move,

recognizing, and after say something   

affirmative but impenetrable,

like, “Ah, there it is,” or, “Well, here we are,”

before penning on a torn piece of blue- 

lined paper her phone number or address, 

a detail I, spun dizzy by my pride 

and tenable ambitions, wouldn’t think 

to probe until morning, until too late,

the poet gone, having left useless marks— 

Would be cast back then, into the lawless 

grief that is desire without object— 

But the recitation ends, the staircase 

empties, the allotted time for questions 

over. The audience forms a trill-less 

curving “R” weaving through the bookcases,  

each of them longing for her signature 

or a brief exchange of words. The next day

while reviewing my notes, I struggled 

to articulate one letter form from

the next, the letter forms depending on

their edges—Those piercing impalpable

edges, what always eluded me—Where  

does a person end and world begin? Who

was that, writing from the staircase with such

rapacious abandon? That "I" forgot 

to cross each low “t,” which bled into low 

“h’s,” so that all the “the’s” read like “me’s.”