Ink by Ayla Rogers

Ink by Ayla Rogers

His favorite teacher taught him how to mean

Every word he used to leave unwritten.

“Make your own marks,” she said, “we’re just drafting.”

Still he held his tongue while she held his hand,

As he trembled under the heft of ink

And the book of glorious white pages,

He swore he’d only sully with his pen.

The starkness strained his eyes, so dry and blue,

The same color as the ink she wrote with,

Like he knew all the words before reading.

So he held his tongue until he turned blue

In the face of writing some new story,

So blue that she could use him as a well

When her favorite pen ran dry from weeping,

Dripping splotches between the lines—he skipped

The ending because she never taught him

How to craft a fitting resolution.

Yet they found the resolve for beginning,

To sound out the syllables and phrases.

“Wait”—but he said, “What,” asking a question

For which she had no answer, no premise,

Forgetting how to dot his eyes and cross his fingers,

They crossed him and he stammered like a child,

Though she was barely older than he was.

She preferred his stammering to silence

And told him the sound was far prettier

Than all the blank pages in her notebook.

Nine months of work, but she could not pass him

By the time he submitted blank pages.

Not wanting to hold him back in his grade,

Her blue pen marked him an “A for effort.”

                                                                                                      

Pencil

BY MARIANNE BORUCH

My drawing teacher said: Look, think, make a mark.

Look, I told myself.

And waited to be marked.

Clouds are white but they darken

with rain. Even a child blurs them back

to little woolies on a hillside, little

bundles without legs. Look, my teacher

would surely tell me, they’re nothing

like that. Like that: the lie. Like that: the poem.

She said: Respond to the heaviest part

of the figure first. Density is

form. That I keep hearing destiny

is not a mark of character. Like pilgrimage

once morphed to mirage in a noisy room, someone

so earnest at my ear. Then marriage slid.

Mir-aage, Mir-aage, I heard the famous poet let loose

awry into her microphone, triumphant.

The figure to be drawn —

not even half my age. She’s completely

emptied her face for this job of standing still an hour.

Look. Okay. But the little

dream in there, inside the think

that comes next. A pencil in my hand, its secret life

is charcoal, the wood already burnt,

a sacrifice.