You lonesome ellipsis, the alphabet’s
first foundling, gape like opened veins
in grey water. You afterthought, you dreaming
balloon, scatter like radiation on the page.
The transcriber pauses on you like a trauma,
battered onto trackless lacunae in the record,
his pen welling out sickness until you are illegible,
and therefore, unloveable. Children throw you
about, you are dangled on the balls of your feet
through the contours of a teacher’s cursive exercise.
“Remember, remember,” they crow and yet heaped
at their shiny boots, you are nothing but a distinction.
Long ago, little firefly, you bobbed in impenetrable thickets
of rasping tongues, ink-clotted manuscripts, now left
to look down at the twenty-six seething waves beneath you.
What are you now? What calling draws you up so high?
Why have you not fallen like a needle through the sea
And stitched the alphabet with your absence?
You were a smattering of eclipses in dappled light, and
immortality suits you, useless thing. You flicker
From crescent to flame, dot to heart, eluding
extinction like a simile.