[Erratum: Found Ecology Piece]
It is easy to erase it—a touch of the delete key on this keyboard. Barely moving my finger. Versus how much intention it took to use the eraser on a pencil, to flip the pencil around my thumb and scrub out the lead etched on the paper.
Stone and rain laugh at me. The amount of time it takes to get marks out of stone (gouges, rough edges, grooves) by rubbing them with water.
Copyright © 2019 by Todd Fredson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 29, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“So often I am engaged by a human encounter. When I think about it outside of the moment and frame it as a scene or fully scaled image, I think, ‘that was a poem.’ This poem was triggered by a typing error. And, as I often do, I began thinking of the pace of change those of us living in parts of the world driven by technological advance cooperate with—and of how, in our continual state of urgency, we are drawn away from the mind we might use to care for things with a multi-generational perspective.”
—Todd Fredson
Todd Fredson
Todd Fredson is the author of Century Worm (New Issues Press, 2018) and Crucifix-Blocks (Tebot Bach, 2012), winner of the 2011 Patricia Bibby First Book Award. His work in translation includes Zakwato & Loglêdou’s Peril, forthcoming in 2023 from Action Books, as well as There where it’s so bright in me (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) and The future has an appointment with the dawn (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), both by Tanella Boni.