How to live again, when all the finished words
have been scraped off to leave the parchment clean.
How to come back willing for new events
to be scratched on old skin, to be reused
in unforeseen languages,
to be spread on a table under infrared
and inch by inch be studied, screened,
stripped down to the subtext. Ultraviolet
looks through the layers to the thing
they mean, the last flake of ink embedded
in a single thread, something holding on
to nothing, speech holding on to silence,
one mark holding on to the abyss
as if all life depended on it.