Writing with Pencil
Peter Huff
I can barely hold a pencil anymore
let alone write a damned thing with one
It’s not because of arthritis or some other disability
or abnormality or injury
or because I don’t like pencils
I do
I have pencils with presidents on them
and Bible verses
and school names
and the names of businesses from the 1960s
with telephone numbers that start with letters
and teeth marks
The pencils I like best
come from Sagrada Família
the unfinished temple in Barcelona
one of which a student swiped in Louisiana
and the Hermann Hesse museum
whose location I can’t remember
It might be Switzerland or New York
or even India
where I think his grandparents served as missionaries
Which is also the setting
for his book called Siddhartha
not about Shakyamuni
but about somebody else
who also found enlightenment the hard way
which I read in the last year of high school
when everything was turning round and round
like teacups at whites-only Fun Town
if you really leaned your first-grade muscles
into that metal dharma wheel
hot as lower hells because of the temperature
and the humidity
and the sun
which in Camus
made Meursault shoot that Arab on the beach
* * *
In the corner of my desk that year
I wrote a message in pencil
not by Hesse
which stayed there for days
until I lined up for graduation
and kissed a girl after she iced her lips with Vaseline
Inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre
or so I thought
I’m pretty sure it was yellow No. 2
At the time
I wondered what it might be like
to have a bad eye
a sexy publishing record
and a smoky female companion
unmarried
who would say
“My reason for living is writing”
Everybody knows that Sartre wrote by hand
in cafés
military camps
schools
Cuba
weather observation stations
his apartment near his mother’s house
and in hotel rooms with his girlfriends
“I don’t understand the Americans
who use typewriters”
he said
Actually I think he used a pen
But then there’s poor Thoreau
whose tombstone among the transcendentalist dead
simply says Henry
“How can I communicate with the gods
who am a pencil-maker on the earth,
and not be insane?”
* * *
In those days
I used to write almost everything with pencil
squeezing for dear life
white-knuckled for god attention
cracking the karma code bare-handed
I’d even get a hard dark blister
on the third finger
of my right hand
if you count the thumb No. 1
the way violinists get that mark on their necks
who don’t number their thumbs at all
I dreamed a lot about higher fame then too
ambition
addiction
even sweet absurdity
But I never really thought much about
the emptiness of the page
the impermanence of the point
or the cloud of the dusty message
swirling round and round
on the paper
in my lungs
no bigger than an inflamed hand on the horizon
or the menacing eraser
Peter Huff has taught world religions at a variety of colleges and universities across the United States. He worked in a bookstore and a psychiatric hospital before launching his academic career. He is the author or editor of seven nonfiction books, including Atheism and Agnosticism: Exploring the Issues (2021). His poetry has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Humanist and 50 Haikus. He lives in Chicago.