the authentic reader
I wrote the old woman down
and thought, for one foolish minute,
that the words were mine.
She sat there holding her afternoon together
with a shopping bag, a blue coat,
and a patience only from cracked hands.
I carried her home in a notebook.
A theft, if we are honest.
A rescue, if we are vain.
Years later
a stranger opens that page.
The old woman rises again.
Not as I knew her.
Never as I knew her.
The reader gives her another face,
another street,
another loneliness.
The blue coat becomes green.
The shopping bag disappears.
The bench becomes a railway platform
where someone\'s mother waits for a son
who has already forgotten the way back.
What authority have I then?
I supplied a handful of words.
The reader supplied
the rain,
the distance,
the son\'s silence,
the mother\'s final hope.
I brought a spark.
The reader built the fire.
And perhaps the old woman herself,
who never knew she entered a poem,
stands somewhere beyond us both,
smiling at our arguments.
For poems are not written once.
They are written
by the eye that first suffers them,
and again
by every eye that cannot leave them alone.
So let this signature remain
at the bottom of each page.
Ink needs its ceremonies.
Yet the truest author
may be the unseen reader
who takes my small wound
and bleeds from it
more deeply
than I ever did.
.