This pen’s a stick of charcoal in my hand.
I sweep in strokes across a page of lined
buff paper, spiral-bound and pale as sand,
or shade with tiny smudges. All I find
outside commuting windows or beyond
my walking gaze, the words I overhear
in small cafes, varieties of blonde,
I note in ink before they disappear
by sketching rapidly in words the way
I’d paint on canvas or emboss on white.
Here’s black and every quality of gray
that intimate the spectrum of the light
I see, the sound I hear, the measured sense
of universe, impossibly immense.