Late at night, stooping to draw
my head is bent left under the slanting roof
the busy scratch of my pencil hums
like an insect in the cavern of my ear.
Hollow static,
white noise-
the sounds molecules must make
as they pass, vibrating a false solidity.
The spaces between them empty
negative space luminous and white
beneath a web of marks.
You could fall into a drawing
if the molecules, softly humming, would allow
your particles safe passage through the emptiness.
She asked me what I was thinking.
I could fall through the floor right now,
I told her.
She laughed, though I had made no joke,
and left me sitting on the bench,
tapping out a soft rhythm on my knees,
dreaming of gaping electrons.
I want to make a film
where I go into the microscopic world
to dissect its architecture,
panning through the molecular structure of walls
where pushpins like huge mining drills
bore into the pocked landscape, the lunar surface
of the white wall where my pictures hang.
Her eyes are on me
and I want to fall into my drawings,
no longer man but molecule,
floating with trilobites
through the skeletal landscape of bridge and tunnel;
to drift into pre-Cambrian dark;
to burrow under a mountain
and curl in the dark, a sleeping ball,
sterile and scentless.
Even so, she will find me out.
She will sift through the millennial strata,
following my trail like an old dog
blindly stupid
comprehending nothing but the desire
to possess. She files me away
in locked boxes and old sketchbooks,
translating each piece into ones and zeros
lacing me into her drawings,
layering the polar opposites.
Somewhere she is scribbling nonsense in the dark.
Each mark she makes is a thought of me--
her clumsy sentiments like cataracts cloud her eyes.
With each mark, my head inclined to the left,
I am thinking of molecules.