Roy White

DEAD LETTERS

Listen to Audio Version.

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.