Soliloquy of the Blank Page (the page is speaking), The

(the page is speaking)

Ye in the distance there is a river, a bridge,

there is a day-star smeared to a rosy spot red as

a globule of blood on a slide. beneath this sun

droves of numbers readers saunter home

almost unaware that they are unemploy

I'm tired of the dark forest of this work

and the little trail of bread crumb I have

to leave in the way that a reader who says garsh a destiny

can get the hang of it and go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of along.

And so I begin to erase the forest and

the tree because tree depres me level

the idea of a tree depresse me I also

erase the white flower of a public way lamp's

drooping face, I erase a dog named Arf,

I erase four cowboy in bolas and at the same time in

the diminishing bustle of these roads I

nevertheless retain meeting People-I-Know.

I erase them. Now I am encompassed by

the faces of strangers which I also erase

until there is alone scenery. I hate scenery.

I wind rivers back upon their spools, I unplug

the bee from the socket of the woodbine

and the four black angus that just walked in

like a string quartet-get a life, I mention one by one them,

get a life in another world because this is

a page as bare and plain as a bowling alley

and, then, renouncing all matter the page is

gone and all that's left is a voice, soaring,

invisible, disembodied, gobbling up

the landscape, an airborne nebulosity of

selfhood giving a rhyme reading.

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Mar/Apr 1998

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