Drawing in a windowsill

(Scratching out a whale
with chalk and charcoal,
it can moan for lips that
smile too easily
to be convincingly

torn.)

She can swim for me,
in dirty waves
of finger-printed dust.
Around a big dead dictionary,
and the sunken red nail-ships
of the Gulf of Rust.
And all throughout
this slab of wooden ideas
are tracings of
the last time,
the tiers of graphite
that fight with the
forces of forgetting.

Pencils slash
and slash
and slash,
and now Whale's
got baleen,
to sieve through the
smudges with ease.
Stumpy
mis-
shapen
ballerina,
can somehow tease;

voluptuous and never dirtier.
With grimey fins she can swim
through waters that stick,
and not sink.
While drawing,
I'm offering myself to you,
and judging by this shapeless
-ness

I should make the waves
into words.
Explain the scribbling,
be
heard over the
scream of badly drawn
gulls,
slashed and
full
with too much air

(even though I was taught
not to leave any white bits,
or go over the lines).

The whale is wholly shaped,
sketched semi-plie
and beautiful
in that silly, childish way.

She's diving now, deep
and low;
and the lower sound
of sleepless moaning
melody doesn't
need words,
or drawings
to be heard.

(It was just a white-washed
wooden guardrail,
with traces of grey
and a dirty little whale.)