An After Hour

When one thing is becoming another, when writing is morphing, when the writing of an hour becomes the desire to write at all hours and into the night, fueled on caffeine or wine and desiring instruments of writing; typewriters, even a nib and ink well, and considering all the ways of stretching a space, digital or hard copy; hard copy, an ugly expression for printed matter, and for that matter, printed matter is efficient but lacks beauty. Page, a soft and elongated word; page, an extension at the end of my fingers; page, a screen that holds dreams and desires; the page of legal document that bind. The page is a promise. I read all sides, turning the page counterclockwise and turning the page over for what I may have missed.

Desire is a stick for scratching words into the dirt and for chiseling stone until the words become solid. The pen is a body, an anatomy, not an earthworm with indecipherable ends; the pen has a head and tail, and inky guts. And the brain of the pen belongs to the maker of marks.

later hours/another hour/late hours/early hours/happy hour/visiting hours.

All the elements of the dying hour surround my laptop, in the dying blades of cut grass and in the dying battery. Finches continue their making of a nest of twigs and grasses, but I know the nest is early paper, the raw ingredients and pulp. I know the world is a page turner, a paper globe, and I know that the birds are the great writers of the sky.