Further Avoidance of Masters Work produces Poem

So I cleaned my office and wrote a poem instead of diving back into memoir, as soon I must:


On Rediscovering My Old Ink Pens

It’s been years since I held them, the sleek silver one,
the fat Mississippi one, lazy in its flow,
the Oxford silver, the cheap pink whore from Woolworth’s,
but when I open them, each of their strong, curved heads
looks ready for action, old lovers, steady, true,
happy to meet my demands: “Yes, that. Like that. There. And there.”

Once, my words flowed from them like a stream,
water on pulp, my looped a’s and b’s
riding the wave of the triple-ruled page, rolling
between the sweet grey covers of a book
I marked, at seven, with my whole name.

No one writes like this now.
The author drags black chains across the screen,
sends words marching and retreating like ants:
no way to write the wrong thing these days,
to bury a mistake in an angry storm, kill it; keep it.

There are five pens – five! -- like the lost fingers of
a hand. I carry them to the kitchen, the Union wounded.
My two palms upward, I bear them to the sink
where I separate them, head from body,
unscrew their separate parts and lay them out
on a sheet of kitchen paper. There. There. There.

With my right hand, I hold them: with my left,
I run the water, a cold stream, then give them
one by one to the cool flood till they weep their colors,
purple and brown and blue, away down the sink,
then weep some more.

I watch their jeweled effluent chase down
the remnants of my lunch: tuna and noodle and bean.
It colors them. It swirls through the dark pipes,
down to meet the earth, to wet it.

I flush out the last pen, the stubborn one,
sending water through and through its vein, and
setting free, as happens sometimes, a sudden clot,
which gushes out, quick, astonishing, like the moment
a woman looks down into the water between her legs
and sees her blood, dropped there like Chinese ink.

When all the barrels run clear and the nibs lie shining,
I wrap the pens in their sheet of paper, marbled now,
and bring them to the table. Then I push each pen’s
sharp secret beak into the hard plastic of the cartridges
I’ve kept, without remembering, for this day.

The pens receive the ink, unsure at first,
then quickly, like thirst: like that same woman
drinking from a man’s body after long years without.
One at a time, I press the nibs, gold and silver,
to the best sheet of paper I can find.

When I move my hand, they bleed,
and I write, as I did the very first time, at seven, my name:
over and over, my name, my name, my name.