Ars Poetica
by Bella Zaccaro
"But it is an echo, waiting for me / to connect its formless gray / into the true image I saw."
By the time I awaken from the stupor
of lightning-strike, burning-fire inspiration,
scrambling for a pen and page,
the vision has already scattered
at embers and sparks.
Still hot, they burn in tiny spots
against my fingers and my palms,
and I press them flat against paper
to watch them carve a smokey shape.
But it is an echo, waiting for me
to connect its formless gray
into the true image I saw.
I make a wish for the glow and
flawless feathers of the phoenix's
fiery return. I make a wish for anything
to burn as brightly as my dream.
Shape it
as I please or as I should,
marked with patterned lowering of keys.
It remains as curling wisps, either lost
or extinguished, hissing for a quiet death.
I step back and smell its sting, how it clings
to the atmosphere and page,
and test if letting cool air seep
into its flickering form
might solve its stubbornness.
Time alone does nothing
but age it.
The drive to invoke my waking dream
smolders in still-living cinders, reaches
out from the smokescreen
and pulls me back with its last warmth
I long to bridge mind and reality.
Look at the divination
on the page and see
not something unfinished,
or else nothing at all—
but what it could be, if
cut into pieces and burned again,
until pencilmark words curl
up into black;
until charred and softened
to soil, to grow again.
With ink-dipped knife I cut
each word into its own,
see the ideas flitting within
paper-pulp, change and reshape
the expanse of before;
and I raise manmade lighter to
the page. The paper does not burn easy
against its meek flame mimic of
better circumstances.
Sparks fall tentative, sickly,
hesitant in their blinking birth and
faint from the moment they are lit.
But in the dark they light the word
in tiny whispers of space around them,
dancing beyond lines on the page.
In the dark it is all you can see.
Precise, I pierce their descent
and flatten them into words,
patterns of inkblot and ash
layering one over the last.
Only as letters burn into themselves,
reincarnated into black-blazed paper,
does the fire against my palms
look like a faint vestige
of the vision that first struck me down.
About the Writer...
Bella Zaccaro is a senior creative writer at Douglas Anderson. She enjoys developing fantasy and sci-fi concepts, and focuses on metaphor-based storytelling in her works as a way of discussing complex themes or experiences.
About the Artist...
Andie Crawford is a Senior at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts. She specializes in drawing and painting.