Nadia Swerdlow



PAPYRUS


Remembering the word
	papyrus,
he casts down, simple
birch white, crisp and fresh,
pristine, unwritten,
marginless within frays
and curled edges,
an ant crossing
across the cycled moment
marking engines perfect,
light, air, water, sun, time,
forces on branches, bark white,
peeled, unpeeled, healed over.


He not remembering
what it would take
for an unpeeling to occur,
for a hand to pick up
and not remember the word
	papyrus
or for fingers tasting immortal
to desire a washing away,
	how fortuitous ends cry
for a branch not to crack,
	rot,
molecules, electrons, ovals
dying too moist, too soon,
the thing he had now,
decomposed unwritten.

What would it take
for him for
	papyrus
	to be an origin, to be
birch-white, hand cradling,
ancient, new born
inarticulated planed honing
down to bare wood
left behind but beginning.

Take the bark springing
	from fresh ground,
	from howevers, therefores,
	dropped semantic
	function, acorns and leaves,
	to peel
	back the causations,
	effects,
	for the synaptic
	moments,
	for a life
	to change
		for all
			   to be
	unwritten
		 .......papyrus......
rewritten.

What would he take
back into that hand
if the moment had passed
and leave behind,
what branch
would he watch as
late fall's revealing?

	To watch.
The whiteness curls
	and a story waits.
Watch the edges brown,
watch wind's precise
	release of dead
but not dead,
watch the new birch white
wood-clean, cover itself,
yet still reach for the old,
	feeling damp grass
underneath it,
feeling the sun still
	curled inside it?





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