Liberties

This is the work of your own hands strange to say, all these stories carved with a certain severity, each woodcut brought forward in strokes, a register of darkness removed.            There’s a tower and a bridge. A figure midway across  watches the shadows below. Midway between what? Today and tomorrow, if you like, cross-hatched in black and white.   There are ways to create gray here. Inking techniques, washes that float the heavy black  up off the page like a boat at high tide, like the slow stain of floodwaters seeping across mired ground undoing the earth, loosening grubby fistfuls to look for worms, asking endless questions, dragging weeds and fenceposts until their roots give way. The clouded sky turns over in its sleep and goes on raining.   I am like a person who has thought so vividly of someone else for years that I no longer have room for them anywhere and when you put No on the table between us, hardly taller than the pepper grinder and salt cellar, I study it carefully – the real thing, not stooping to If but brief and apparent as sunrise