June 2017
Robert Wexelblatt
wexelblatt@verizon.net
I live near Boston and teach philosophy at Boston University.  Besides academic pieces, I write fiction when I’m up to it and poems when I can’t help it.  I use a fountain pen—my link to tradition—and write to music.  I’ve published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals.  My most recent book is Heiberg’s Twitch. 
​
Inditing

1 

I write with a German fountain pen,
my chief link to tradition and a
black memento of my freakish tastes.
 
2

I do it on paper without lines. 
I must improvise; my writer’s task
can, on need, be whittled down to this.
 
3

My hand squeezes the pen too tightly; it
seems writing rubs my middle finger
the wrong way.  Writing leaves calluses.

4

Appalled, I hasten to lift the nib: 
each sentence a slash, each clause a stab. 
The paper aches as from a crude tattoo.
 
5

I write to music, the air’s unstill;
words feel half-hearted and half-witted
unless I can tell and hear at once.

6

My letters have begun to say goodbye;
S goes her way, I denies his fellows. 
I fear graphology more than reviews.

7

Fountain pen? Inkwell?  Oh, what fathoms
of hope redolent of moist Helicon! 
But Muses’ liquid lips tell holy lies.

8

Sleeping Beauty was a writer who took
a century to invent her plot.
The prince’s kiss was a first sentence.
 
9

Writing is a perpetual war
with an infinite number of truces. 
I am a coward who deserts his post.
 
 


 
An Empty Day


Luxuries confer no honor,
devouring without cooking.  This
unearned respite you readily
rationalize:  I was exhausted,
just catching my breath, recharging
the battery.  I’m entitled. 
The idle afternoon is so
sodden with quiet you slip
from nap to nap.  This twenty-four-hour
vacation has vacuumed your mind
clean of daydreams; your body hardly
strains against gravity, wallowing
in nothingness, like a blinking
hippo nostril-deep in mud.
Yet nobody chides, no one objects. 
Is that why the residue of
the day is a petty prick of shame? 
It’s no hornet’s sting, hardly a
mosquito’s bite.  Nevertheless,
it nettles.  All the same, it smarts.  
​ “Inditing” first appeared in The Literary Review
            “Empty Day” first appeared in Orion Headless
© 2017 Robert Wexelblatt
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