It’s not a glass of water that I keep
beside the bed
but this notebook.
Sometimes I write in the dark
The pen moving on the page
the pen writing
Fingerlike, it scratches, clutches, points.
It’s a branch of thought
and yields its own fruits,
offers shelter and shade.
The following day I find them
hardly believing what I wrote
Sometimes I am dumbstruck
At the notes battered by the light
Looks grey, faded and worn.
I’ve often imagined that the writing
Sometimes outlive the act of thought
as though they were poles
with measurable trajectories
hurled in a battle.
Then I think that in a Notebook
It just left lines
of the kind that must stay
for some time embedded
criss-cross, cross-hatched,
upholding their architecture
like poles holding the roof
during construction.
The double line,
then the line that comes third
recall something in your mind.
When in search of words
I have to draw up your figure
I have to draw upon the words
Carved in the night
that are analogues of my thoughts
until the combination safe
of my voice unlocks itself.
The pen glides
towards the groin of the page,
and in silence collects the writing
From the words in the Notebook.
This book has the geometric confines
of a troubled state on which I place
straight borders in the dunes.
Now I draw while I tell this,
that telling will take its shape.
It is like a cloud
appearing to have
the form of a cloud.
In the evening when the light is small
I hide the Notebook within the bed and
gather the outlines of reasoning
that run in silence upon my limbs.
It is here that I must weave
the tapestry of thinking
and in arranging the threads of myself
design within me my mind.
This is not a work
but a working-out.
First from Notebook, then from the mind.
To conceive of the form of thought,
shape it subsequently by a measure.