E2K: a journal for the new literary paradigm

Poetry

The Shape of a Life in Books (for F.S.B.)

by Scott Ecksel

Marginal notes. Stevens.
"When the singing stops,
are the lights the order,
or are they always
a part of each other?"

Williams. Yachts.
"The sea tries to
grasp the boats."
"The sea is alone
even w/ the boats."

I see in the slant
of each line, in the care
you took to curve each letter,
flaring the edges,
deepening the basin
of each downstroke
(like sunlight
curls a petal
on the windowsill),
how these words were words
you adored.

So I trace them.

Cellophane might be ideal;
it would grip the page,
and later grip the mirror,
for me to see myself
through your words.

But I have no cellophane
and disbelieve in chance, so
I use pencil, and peer,
squinting, through parchment
skimmed with sunlight,
to copy the poems
and your notes,
to copy you.

"A part of each other." Order,
and belonging. Singing
that's stopped. Your books
discarded. Not by chance
I found them. But where
in all this are you?

What were you grasping for,
that even finding it you were
alone? Alone,
even with all these books.

I sit in the midst of them, unearthing
the shape of your life. Here
on the soiled carpet, scuffed
by too many winter's afternoons'
trudgings with slush-packed boots,
I've planted tilting piles
of paperbacks, travel guides,
art guides to the Tate, to Rothko
and Radwi, novels by Leavitt and Monette,
and poetry, poetry everywhere.

Poetry, I was taught, should be organic.
Something here should grow. I traced
your words. I put myself in a trance
trying to become you.
Now give me what you found!

But you're gone.
You're gone, your singing
stopped, your words discarded
even though I found them. I can't find
you. If not by chance, then what?

What about my books? What about the time
and time and time spent breathing in the dusty
must of old paperbacks, my trembling hands
on either side of an old first edition, my eyes
closed longing longing for old stairwells shaded
plantation porches moss-glowing garden views
where I could sit and be in a longing for anywhere
else. When you...

When you illuminated - love! love! -
when you illuminated with such love -
with adoration! - these fraying margins,
you, too, were facing the town, were watching
"the fishing boats at anchor there," were staggered
by the "entanglement of watery bodies."

If not by chance I found your books,
then they were never "discarded" at all,
and you and I are a part of each other,
and by unearthing the shape of your life,
I discover the shape of my own.

But what kind of shape
finds its form in the margins?

I wish I could tell you.

Scott J. Ecksel lives in Washington, D.C., where he writes fiction and poetry and spends his spare time watching the sloth bears at the National Zoo. Currently, he is working on a novel for young adults.