Allison's Archives

sometimes I think I did this to myself / most of the time I know so / that I held on to the pen so hard my fingerprints have been cursed onto its body / that the ink draws from blood of mine / and now so many winters have passed / there no longer exists the possibility / of removing this pen from me / of removing me from this pen 

it is lonely labor / writing / this much I know / I had never expected it to match up to the grand forging of / swords wielded in great wars / cathedrals in which people fall to their knees / crowns that have blessed the heads of the worthy and the bad / this is lonely labor / writing / the grinding of a millstone / the scraping of the quern / it is heavy and because of that I cannot put it down / it refuses to be put down

I turn every sentence against the teeth of my conscience / crack each metaphor open like a frozen river / create commas out of silences / go back to the warmth of the first words my mother had sounded to my cradle / all for a false promise of spring / is spring’s tardiness to blame / or is my foolish faith to blame

this weary work / this bone-deep work / no parts of me are soft anymore / I may well be sinew and grit / but this hardness is better than the emptiness / the page listens to me / the words stay / every sentence I have ever laid down in ink / I have had to fight for / the line looks clean does it not / you can’t tell I struggled can you 

the desk is altar and hearth / I am a religious cynic / I am still made of something that wants to be heard / hear me / hear me ask / how many times do I have to bury my words before they stop crawling back to you / how many drafts must I crumple before the grief stops editing itself in your favor / how many metaphors do I need to shatter before they stop collapsing into you / how many pages must I cast into fire before the ash stops spelling you out 

I write to make up for the fact / the fact that it is me holding the pen / the work beckons my name softer than you ever did / I reach for the ache / I reach for the ink / I reach for the stubborn pulse of a story that has yet to be written / save me / don’t come near me / I am busy writing 

_{The accompanying image (The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich, c.1810) serves only as a visual complement to the essay and carries no interpretive or illustrative claim beyond that.}