To a Blank Page

Ah, Blank Page! Let’s have a couple of drinks,
   Old foe, just you and I! The amber shade
Of whiskey might suit your pleasure (methinks)
   And ease your awful whiteness, or persuade
A sound or two from out your void? Dear Sphinx,
   Why love this field of silence you have made?
But I see your point: we think ourselves clever,
And few of us are apt to shut up ever.

Blank Page, let’s have some laughs and lighter hues!
   Relax— that’s laughs, not laughable contentions.
Not arguments, not principles, not news--
   But comic words might slip through your preventions?
Or would you care to climb and see the views?
   The mountains here are vast in their dimensions.
We’ll clamber over rocks, and sticks, and clods,
And ne’er attempt to claim we know the Gods.

True, there is scarce to tempt you in our time.
   Page, you would retire, then nothing more?
You knew Milton, and Wordsworth in his prime--
   No wonder when I come you slam the door!
You glance suspiciously, as if a crime
   I‘ve committed. Then Page, what if I swore
To write only of life’s eddying surface
Without meaning, or some befuddled purpose?

Grant me then this space, provisionally?
   Page, you eye me blankly, wanting me gone,
Plan my destruction by setting me free,
   And so consent, all objections withdrawn!
Clever joke, Page! (with a hint of cruelty)--
   You give me a world to scratch upon
With my antique poetry, pale and wan,
In my suspect Spring and dubious dawn.

Damn, it’s lonely out here! Hello? Hello?
   It seems Blank Page pack’t up, then disappeared
As I made ruts and tracks in his pure snow,
   Clumsily, exactly what he disdained and feared!
And now You, Reader, gaping there to know
   What the hell I’m about--don’t stand so near!
You make me want to run from you, and hide
From this emptiness without--and inside.

The emptiness is inescapable.
   Yet rain seems to recite, wind to write music,
And the ocean is so seascapeable
   To the painter! Storms seem to howl in Gaelic
Or some tongue, lost, and yet unbreakable--
   Or is that of the mind, kill’t by a pinprick?
Over and over I feel hope, and then
My hope fails, and the page goes blank again.