Re: OT: poem of the day

    A friend of mine emailed me this poem... enjoy...

                                   Writing

        The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
        these by themselves delight, even without
        a meaning, in a foreign language, in
        Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
        all day across the lake, scoring their white
        records in ice. Being intelligible,
        these winding ways with their audacities
        and delicate hesitations, they become
        miraculous, so intimately, out there
        at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
        and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
        balance against great skeletons of stars
        exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
        by echo alone. Still, the point of style
        is character. The universe induces
        a different tremor in every hand, from the
        check-forger's to that of the Emperor
        Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
        the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
        writers nervously of a nervous world, and so on.

        Miraculous. It is as though the world
        were a great writing. Having said so much,
        let us allow there is more to the world
        than writing: continental faults are not
        bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
        Not only must the skaters soon go home;
        also the hard inscription of their skates
        is scored across the open water, which long
        remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.

                                                Howard Nemerov


--
Hanuman Zhang

>     Verbing weirds language.

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