The Authentic Reader

I wrote the old woman down

and thought, for one foolish minute,

that the words were mine.

She sat there holding the afternoon together

with a shopping bag, a blue coat,

and the patience of cracked hands.

I carried her home in a notebook.

A theft, if we are honest.

A rescue, if we are vain.

Years later

a stranger opens the page.

The old woman rises again.

Not as I knew her.

Never as I knew her.

The reader gives her another face,

another street,

another loneliness.

The blue coat becomes green.

The shopping bag disappears.

The bench becomes a railway platform

where someone's mother waits for a son

who has already forgotten the way back.

What authority have I then?

I supplied a handful of words.

The reader supplied

the rain,

the distance,

the son's silence,

the mother's final hope.

I brought a spark.

The reader built the fire.

And perhaps the old woman herself,

who never knew she entered a poem,

stands somewhere beyond us both,

smiling at our arguments.

For poems are not written once.

They are written

by the eye that first suffers them,

and again

by every eye that cannot leave them alone.

So let the signature remain 

at the bottom of the page.

Ink needs its ceremonies.

Yet the truest author

may be the unseen reader

who takes my small wound

and bleeds from it

more deeply

than I ever did.

.