This Scribe, My Hand

When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave. —John Keats 1. You are here on the underside of the page, writing in water, anachronist, showing your head with its delicate fuses, its fatal telemetry, a moundful of triggers and gunpowder like a field-mine, your sixty-one inches and your gem-cutter’s fingers, anonymous, taking the weight of a “roomful of people” but making no mark, pressing the page as I write, while the traffic in Rome, demotic with engines and klaxons, circles the Pyramid of Cestius, crosses a graveyard, and submerges again like the fin of a shark. 2. I write, in the posthumous way, on the flat of a headstone with a quarrier’s ink, like yourself: an anthologist’s date and an asterisk, a parenthetical mark in the gas of the pyramid-builders, an obelisk whirling with Vespas in a poisonous motorcade. I make your surgeon’s incision for solitude—one living hand, two poets strangled in seawater and phlegm, an incestuous ego to reach for the heart in the funeral ashes, a deathbed with friends. 3. Something murderous flows from the page to my hand— a silence that wars with the letters, a fist that closes on paper: a blow with the straight edge of a razor that falls with a madman’s monotony; or the adze of a sleepwalking Sumerian nicking the wet of the clay, hacking a wedge in a tablet in the blood and the mica, till all glistens with language. The criminal folds up his claspknife. The shutters slam down on the streets.Nobody listens. 4. Out of breath with the climb, and tasting a hashish of blood, what did he see on the brink of the Piazza di Spagna? A hand in the frame of a cithara where beggars and sunbathers clotted the levels like musical signatures, a Wordsworthian dream of “degree,” “unimaginable time” touched by an axe blade—or a pram on the Steps of Odessa torn from the hands of its mother, gathering speed for the plunge and rocking its tires in the rifling, like a gun barrel, smashing its way through the Tzar’s executioners, to a scream at the bottom? 5. A failed solitude... The bees in the Protestant grass speak of it delicately in the sweat of a Palatine summer, guiding my hand through the Braille of the letters. Violet, bluet, or squill— what was it I picked under the epitaph, what rose to my touch in the thirst of the marble, a cup from the well of your grave in the noonday miasma, a hieroglyph in the water, saying: solitude, solitude, solitude: you have it at last—your solitude writing on water, alone with its failure. 6. You are there on the underside of the page, a blue flower in my Baedeker, writing on water. I know it. The paper pulls under my pen peaks into waves running strongly into the horizon. The emptiness hardens with balustrades, risers, and levels, a staircase of Roman azaleas. I slip on the blood and the ink toward the exigent bed of a poet. All is precarious. A maniac waits on the streets. Nobody listens. What must I do? I am writing on water, blazing with failures, ascending, descending among lovers and trippers. You are pressing me hard under the paper. At Santa Trinità dei Monti the stairway parts like an estuary, rises and falls like a fountain. There is nothing to see but a death-mask, your room in an island of risers and treads, oddly gregarious, an invisible hand in the granite. 7. The tidal salts drain on a living horizon, leaving a glare on the blemishing paper. The silence is mortal. Nobody answers. for Joan Hutton Landis