It begins as a dark wing arcing up,
then cart wheeling high, swooping
down, then back up to a point before
diving as falcons do toward the earth
with great straightness, curving up
at the very last moment, in this case
before meeting the blue solid line, climbing
to intersect the first long arc,
then doubling back on its path.
The pencil wheels across the blank
page, it flies into another loop,
and another, pushes into a bow
and then bends, sweeps and circles again,
and the boy moves his hand, entranced
by the leaden record of its dance
as his thoughts appear on uneven horizons
until the whole page
is a flock of slender black wings
all of them rising at once,
that beating, that beating, his heart.
“by the leaden record of its dance…” Your use of, leaden, amid all these beating and swooping wings and hearts is _so_ the right word.
Ahh… cursive. I once used cursive, until I fell in love with a highschool upperclass-goddess who printed. My writing hasn’t been the same since.
I love how the first stanza doesn’t focus on the boy at all, but on the pencil, its tip, just the way the boy must be focused. All is pencil point, and the fluidity of that stanza is just amazing. It mimics so well the act of writing cursive.
Not to say that stanza two is any less effective, for the boy emerges but the touch is light, almost as proof that the boy “is entranced” perhaps as much as the reader. And the birds. Exactly.