Philip Gross
Palimpsest
I heard the body whisper to the soul.
This is the oldest of news
that stays news: any turn of the page
can be a brink, a stumbled
step, the rupture of a vein, that sets
the compass needle in you spinning
as if at the North Magnetic Pole,
nowhere… You come to in a library hush;
you’re shelved between befores
and afterwords, between codex and scroll,
skin to skin with the calf and the kid.
Like them, we are the corpus. Feel the flow
of text across your surface, as a cuttlefish
might feel its shivering auroras.
And all those years you thought you were
the story… Footnotes, at best.
Errata. Days, scratched out. Nights, itched
into tatters by a question. Precious
vellum, though, was scraped and pumiced
back into use. Could you get to know, if not
quite love, yourself as palimpsest,
not whole but… more so? Patched, gone
threadbare or too faint to read,
still, the book is a life, a patient listening,
the words, marks in the dust
of a suburban yard left by tumbleweed
end-over-ending away, the wind, never
at rest on this earth, moving on.