after Tomas Tranströmer

The pen lies in space.
Someone put it down
long ago. It is still drawing

the space around
something, something

like a hand, full of spaces touching
what is neither revealed
nor concealed.

It is nothing like the snow outside.
Where whoever can still be sketched
is no one worth peering into.

Perhaps like that hand
the pen cannot stay asleep. It can only keep

scratching a nothing against nothing,
like a hand trying to mark
the emptiness it reached from.

That hand is elsewhere now—
picking strawberries or sweeping dust,
clipping wings or shattering a bowl.
Or none of these things.

It does not matter who will come back for the pen.
It matters that we move around in emptiness,
that we move emptiness around, hoping for emptiness

to end, to be revealed
as each of these things.

But the hand elsewhere
is as certain as the hand
not here now. The pen rings

with the space of its holding.

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