What did I lose when I lost it?
Not the flesh and blood,
but the human trace
of pen on paper
manifestly mine.
 
Even my signature is an ipad-
finger-painted slur
I don’t recognize.
 
When I had my own hand,
I had love letters (sent, and, 
like love, lost); I had lists
to tell tomorrow-me
“trust this—it’s from you;”
 
I had checks like my mother’s checks,
and some recipes whose stains ran
ink into memory. 
 
A self writing words out 
in no “font” but my own home-made 
penmanship, the child’s first letters 
a light graphite shadow behind 
a teenager’s ink-proud identity—
 
A note passed in the hall; a boy’s name
inscribed under a book flap; poems
copied out into a composition book,
 
the marble covers smooth as a monument.
And then the woman’s hand, decades
of handwork dated and lined 
in slender marble sheaves now on a shelf. 
The tap then was no plastic rat-a-tat 
 
but a silent draw on a well, 
deep, sometimes shallow, 
so that my hand flowed,
 
and sometimes hovered, held back
by a catch in the throat, until 
the breath released, a current 
flowing through chest, arm, 
and hand into a form made of 
 
words taking shape
as a recognition comes clear 
in longhand—
 
in my hand. 
 
A hand I lift and look at now
curious to see—Mine, this lined
and deep-veined paw,
its grooved palm
tracing a life?
 
Mine, the grasp 
I don’t remember 
letting go? 
 
Now, let the loss
be mine to take in hand,
hold, turn this way
and that, and then
right –
 
Write — curious to learn
what’s gone, what’s more.
                        

When they fail me, words
for Sandra’s son, the French town 
with the riverside café,
the state of being --- ehhhh! –

Words fail so fully the veil is absolute, 
a sudden shroud over eyes point blank
at a bare white wall.

Fending off the panic of the wordless void, 
I turn to my ABC’s on the blue-lined page 
once claimed with a fat black pencil.  
Dropping my gaze from the pitiless present
to a child’s composition book, with soft lead
I trace holy shapes, straight lines, half-circles, 
shapes that compose themselves in apple-pie order
into my primary twenty-six, holding everything I know.

Try the blond-haired boy against-- Ahh…Aaron, 
Anthony; no; no boorish or bookish blundering Billy; 
no edgy Chris or Cooper; no dull and diligent Doug;
on to the soft middle, Lll—no Liam, a little like Luke,
no; a humming Mmm, Mark? Matthew? close, wait,
Michael! materializes with an audible snap,
a perfect fit in his one true alphabetic niche. 

The town where we ate crepes, drank vin ordinaire
by the Loire? Fau--? Or Fou--? Val-de--- hmmm? 
Vivant, we joked, bon vivants on the cheap…
Close. I let a child’s hand draw the sharp 
line down, line up, a V that all at once 
brings a hazy fairy tale village into focus – 
Vouvant!

Letter by letter—ehh-excel—
the alphabet—exx--exal—
gives me words:
exaltation!

No one told the child who memorized a runic rhyme
that someday a woman would intone it as an incantation,
a prayer she knew would be answered, primary
as Our Father, but a different god, a different gift.