The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters 
these by themselves delight, even without 
a meaning, in a foreign language, in 
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve 
all day across a lake, scoring their white 
records in ice. Being intelligible, 
these winding ways with their audacities 
and delicate hesitations, they become 
miraculous, so intimately, out there 
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world 
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist 
balance against great skeletons of stars 
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way 
by echo alone. Still, the point of style 
is character. The universe induces 
a different tremor in every hand, from the 
check-forger's to that of the Emperor 
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy 
the 'Slender Gold'. A nervous man 
Writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on. 


Miraculous. It is as though the world 
were a great writing. Having said so much, 
let us allow there is more to the world 
than writing: continental faults are not 
bare convoluted fissures in the brain. 
Not only must the skaters soon go home; 
also the hard inscription of their skates 
is scored across the open water, which long 
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.