The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters <br />these by themselves delight, even without <br />a meaning, in a foreign language, in <br />Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve <br />all day across the lake, scoring their white <br />records in ice. Being intelligible, <br />these winding ways with their audacities <br />and delicate hesitations, they become <br />miraculous, so intimately, out there <br />at the pen’s point or brush’s tip, do world <br />and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist <br />balance against great skeletons of stars <br />exactly; the blind bat surveys his way <br />by echo alone. Still, the point of style <br />is character. The universe induces <br />a different tremor in every hand, from the <br />check-forger’s to that of the Emperor <br />Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy <br />the ‘Slender Gold.’ A nervous man <br />writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on. <br /> <br /> <br />Miraculous. It is as though the world <br />were a great writing. Having said so much, <br />let us allow there is more to the world <br />than writing: continental faults are not <br />bare convoluted fissures in the brain. <br />Not only must the skaters soon go home; <br />also the hard inscription of their skates <br />is scored across the open water, which long <br />remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.<br /><br />Howard Nemerov<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/writing-40/
