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Page 48

Sounds like "Poet, ask not what the page
can do for you. Ask only what you can do
for the page." But I have nothing to say
about pages. It's me I make new.

I remember who wrote the previous page --
some page freak (no doubt afraid
of paper tigers lurking in paper jungles).
Not a bad bloke -- me a few minute ago --
but this is (was) (will be) now. And,

come to think of it, enough about me;
it's YOU I would make new, you
whose face hovers (unidentified
saucer eyes) over the words I now write,

I would set you free from that face's
fixidity, as, in the mirror, looked at
long enough, a face begins to blur, flow,
change shape faster and faster,
its flicker become that of time itself.

(And I? And you? No longer any face --
from where do we watch?)

Why? Why free myself or you from what
fixes us? To make you good? To make you
happy? No, to give us choice, the newness
of the page (really of the poet who faced it,
able to be nothing and create anything,
glad of a game), to leave us poised
on the brink of possibility, ready
to decide to be.

Why? Because one day I will knock
on your door and ask if you can
come out and play. Every poem
does that.

Note: I like the challenge of a poem like this, that should be the end of this collection, but isn't – so how does one go on? But one does, and it's good to know that one (or more) can do that, because we always start at the end of something.

It's a sufficiently twisty and (I hope) refreshing elaboration upon Grandma's lace (in the previous poem) to remedy or balance the truisms of that poem.

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