Anthologies on Poets.org may not be curated by the Academy of American Poets staff.

Something never white or black

[Aleph]

א

This page once was blank, once was pulp,
once was tree. Someone dips a pen
in the inkwell and the letter appears.
Pictograph of an eye,
a skull, which should be bleached white
but now is black. Its curved horns point
the way to the Pacific cliffs toward the sea.

What has a beginning must have an end,
you’d think. Draw a line
from here across the ocean—it would stop
at the isle of the dead. Shapes slink toward us
through a pinkish, clinging fog. A silent letter
begins our names, unpronounceable

but for a glottal grunt. I tell you the ancient
stories—Jonathan and David, Achilles and Patroclus.
Men like us have always been here. If you separate
the right glyph from the left, if you
deconstruct the letter,

the world almost ends. Once this page was blank
but now is not. Text me a photo of your left hand,
my gold band
circling your finger with half of infinity’s ring.

Dear Henry,

Catherine Staples

Henry Thoreau who has been at his fathers since the death of his brother was ill & threatened with lockjaw! his brothers disease.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like Achilles smearing his face with soot,

shearing his hair at the news of Patroclus’s death,

you, too, took a step to the world of the dead

when your brother died. Bewildered,

your jaw and limbs stiffened with his.

Then it ended—like floodwaters, it subsided.

You were alive. His memory, a bright

vein of quartz looping through granite,

a glinting diagonal, unsullied and intact

within you. Oblique, flashing—

you leapt

the Emersons’ back stairs, two at a time,

rat-a-tat of a stick on a railing, children

like capes in your wake, you found the first

huckleberries, tamed the woodchuck. Borrowed

the ax, built the cabin, played your brother’s flute.

You drew the oars, then let them go.

Dear invisible, dear true,

with every endeavor, you held him close.

You swallowed the long winter—

and his lost vigor flew through you.