I am an old man now.
My hands know the weight
of small blades,
how pressure must be patient
and come from the elbow
or the line collapses.
Once,
I was a poet
before I knew what that meant.
I loved a woman
I never touched.
Her voice reached me first,
raw as a whiskey throat,
and I believed—
because I was young—
that wanting was the same as knowing.
I paid five dollars
to sit close enough
to see sweat gather
where the lights made her human.
My heart tried to leave me.
It did not ask permission.
Later,
the girl beside me disappeared,
as girls do.
The boy I was disappeared too,
replaced by a uniform
and a bottle passed hand to hand
in a room that smelled of boots and Brasso.
When the radio said her name
and then said “dead,”
I drank until morning
and learned how grief
can make a body useless.
Other men stood in my place that day.
They did not ask why.
Now, decades later,
I carve her again.
Not the woman—
the resistance.
Linoleum pushes back
where I want it to open.
Lines fill in.
Shadows refuse instruction.
Each proof shows me
what I missed,
what I thought I understood too soon.
I return with the chisel,
Still old, still slow,
still believing in correction.
This is what love was,
even then:
not ease,
not possession,
but the long willingness
to keep cutting
after the image fights back.
The continuing attempt to get it right.
