Twenty Pages
From Wikipen
Twenty pages—
twenty blank pages
in a book of twenty-five
after three years.
I started sketching portraits
on anything I could find—
napkins, notepads, ends of wallpaper—
and decided to invest
in a sketchbook:
clean, thick paper, perfect-bound,
easily worthy of the bookshelf.
Five pages in three years
and hardly a drawing anywhere else.
"I should draw this in my sketchbook,"
I'd think, scrawling a rough figure
on the back of a flyer,
and stop, not wanting to waste effort
on a rough draft.
But by the time I pull the book out
the fire is gone, leaving only
the cold perfection
of the untouched pages, accusing:
your feeble art no more deserves
these pages
than fingerpaint the Louvre:
better not to squander the book
until I can improve on the blankness.
And twenty pages,
twenty pages have bested
my pretensions to art
with their pristine logic—
so I sit, pencil in hand,
afraid to waste the paper.
