Visiting the poet’s shrine, I rubbed
a stick of graphite with my fingers
across a sheet of paper laid on stone—
To take away what: a letter? a vowel?
semblance of thin speech sent forward
across the void? Whatever it is
that transferred there is willful:
my doing, applied to a text that hardly
knows the compound altered by the years.
In response to Via Negativa: Thinned.