Scribere

"...to transcribe is just that— to bring a message 
across a threshold" ~ Mary Capello




And in this way, everything is a note—
            fan-shaped siftings of sunlight 

                       in the corner where a woman is talking
       with someone, headphones cancelling out

            the noise in the rest of the room as she
herself takes notes— 

                       The shirtless man jogging in the direction 
       of the bridge, insistent message of heat
 
             traveling from brow to nape to somewhere 
along the middle
               
                       crease of the spine's crumpled envelope—
And isn't language indebted in this way  

       to both the image and to thought? When the leaf 
              in the window bay emerged

                       as one of many along the stalks 
       transferred from some hothouse into a heavy urn, 

did it just then start to stipple its undersides in yellow,
              each dot circled as if in red pencil, or

       wasn't it always quietly transcribing in the dark? 
              Signals proliferate the way a lighthouse blinks, 

its one eye furious in a storm, the way
                        one cry, one blast, gives birth to whole

galaxies— Miles and centuries from the instant,
       are we not among the things still rocking in its wake—