The Monk Illuminates a Manuscript
My brush tips on my finger end
and lifts a soundless drop of green.
It makes a spot of loudness
when I tap a leaf of Eden
in a letter’s thumb-wide curve.
It’s the noise of who I am,
not insistent, not joyful yet,
and stepping again on the place
between knowing and wondering.
A thing that nudges his own voice away
because he toils near a Truth.
But what I see from here seems bent.
I think the Garden has forgotten me
as it remembers bigger sounds.
What racket must have overflowed
when that quick fall tipped them out
and made their crooked elbows swim?
What words gesticulated
in the floating ovals of their breath?
I must lift them out of silence—slowly,
as if with cups. Many circles spilling
the empty color of water
until a squirm of loss appears,
and then a louder one. And finally,
in lines, the cursive grief.
Falling through the wind,
two twisting shapes that gasp
like brass-colored fish.
______________
Patricia Nelson