First Draft Poem by Arundhathi Subramaniam

It's just old fashioned, they say,
to use pen and paper for first drafts

but I still need
the early shiver of ink
in a white February wind —

the blue slope and curve
of letter
bursting into stream

the smudge of blind alley
the retraced step, the groove
of old caravan routes, the slow thaw

of glacier, the chasm that cannot be forded
by image.

And I need reprieve, perhaps a whole season,
before I arrive at that first inevitable chill

when a page I dreamt piecemeal
in some many-voiced moon-shadowed thicket

flickers back at me
in Everyman's handwriting

filaments of smell and sight
cleanly amputated —
Times New Roman, font size fourteen.