Two Poems
Peter de Swart
THE ALPHABET
The artists must have been on strike
when, one fateful day,
a scribe invented the alphabet:
a row of squat, ugly marks
so bereft of grace,
so ignorant of the world’s
unfurling shapes,
it offends the eye.
The Gods must have been asleep
when the scribe
first attempted an a,
then bumped into a b,
chipped out a c,
and doodled a d,
and arranged this scrape of letters
in unfleshed words —
soon to be stacked
in ossuaries of books,
a bare-boned rattle —
immortality
this side of death.
And, without a living voice,
without the enveloping noise,
did the scribe wonder
where the many-hued world had gone?
Or did he cosset the unsightly, crawling things
knowing that they would sprout wings?
DISCOURS DE LA CONDITION DE L’HOMME
A handful of scribbled, yellowed pages, barely legible —
words, entire sentences scored out
with impatient, scratching strokes of the pen
that have bled here and there and stained the paper —
stains that now seem part of the writing
as if the pen could not contain the thought
and something formless spilled out.
And as I try to decipher these lines
that were written long ago,
it’s as if the words ran into these stains
only to emerge reeling, blinded,
and what remains is this testimony,
these scampering traces, a scratching for answers
much like the scratchings on countless other pages
that have been lost, that had to be lost
so that the same questions can be asked anew
and the same blindness is never the same blindness,
the same scamper never the same scamper
but ours, always again, disjoint —
these lines (ibid.) a case in point.
Peter de Swart grew up in Holland, studied philosophy in Paris and art and literature in Los Angeles. He is a sculptor and resides in the Bay area. Stories of his have been published in Georgia Review, Wisconsin Review, Mobius, Fourteen Hills, Kestrel, Oxford Magazine and other magazines. Peter de Swart is online at peterdeswartsculpture.net.