all he had remaining of the man was a blank page.

He thought, "I'll try to draw him, as well as I can recall," but his best efforts dissipated into erasure and doodling.

"I know, I'll write down what I remember," he decided. And when he'd exhausted all his memories, even having embellished them with superfluous adjectives and parts of speech whose names he swore he'd learned in school,

there was still nothing there but a blank page.

"OK, I'll revise it," he schemed, and turned to historical fiction,

an epic starring—you guessed it; who else?—his father. Yet rereading what he'd written, he recognized he'd written not about his father, but had merely invented

a caricature of himself.

So the blank page was now a strange sort of mirror, and his father was, still,

(après Baudelaire)

a blank page whose white space defends it.




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This is a prose-poem I've had sitting around for a while. The title is the first line. You probably figured that out.

(In case you're not familiar: in a prose poem like this, each line is a paragraph. So what might look like line breaks are just the right-hand margin. I've put a blank space between each actual line.)