The Vanishings

Philip Graham

"The now firmly-established prose poem lends itself well to the fableistic imagination, the creative energies of the archetypical trickster; seizing on seemingly limitless possibilities, Philip Graham achieves an impressive match of form and content in this, his first collection. Imagine Sisyphus approaching a great hill--one that may at any moment turn into a meteor--and pushing a stone that might as easily dissolve into a fish, a fist, or a wand, and you begin to grasp the inventive playfulness and sometimes frightening seriousness of these poems."

from the review of The Vanishings in Virginia Quarterly Review, V. 55, #2, Spring 1979.

Handprints

Only after handprints appeared on the walls did I realize I walk in my sleep.

No doubt these were my own form of bread crumbs through the forest, and so I memorized their positions in the halls, side rooms--wherever they raised their palms. Then each day before breakfast I'd search out the new prints, hoping to rediscover the paths I'd felt my way to the night before.

But if there were any patterns, they were lost in some dream I couldn't remember.

Awake, alone and lost, I decided to invest in the hope of common cleansers: I scrubbed down the handprints. Or rather, tried, for no matter how hard I rubbed, they only became clearer, and my colorless wallpaper came more and more to resemble precinct files.

I devoted less time to sleep and more to cleaning, I exhausted myself and my supply of Brillo. The handprints continued to multiply: in number, into themselves. They became concave, a kind of cringe into the wall. They crept inward until--slowly--they developed wrists, forearms. Soon there were over a hundred holes, each reaching in with five fingers to the center of the house.

I began to sleep again, long hours of dreams that it seems only the arms in my walls, still growing, could retain. And in the few hours I dared wake and walk about, I had no choice but to keep, with great difficulty, my hands in my pockets.

And today, all at once, the holes, from shoulder sockets on, began waving inside: some with wistful delicacy, others with a kind of subdued anger. They continue even now. I've examined them all, each one as individual in motion as they are identical in shape. And I wait, because I can't see in beyond their fingertips, and I have no way of telling to whom, or what, they wave, or whether it's a greeting, or a farewell.