Dictionary of Riddles, Mark Bryant, 1990, p. 80
12/1/2017
[Photo to come!]
Riddle me, riddle me, riddle me
I never was, am always to be,
Who live and breathe
never released, and yet used
What runs all day and all night?
What is it that never moves?
What never comes back?
What never comes?
What never?
the water never touches
the water
the sun making a shadow
all day facing home
smoother than any rhyme,
loves to fall but cannot climb
a lot of noise
you can’t hear
sing a melody, a song
go on
If you feed it
If you give it water
I’m in everyone’s way,
I stop;
What has a head but cannot think?
This was a really fun, but odd, text to use for an erasure. Riddles are so poetic already, many of them having meter and rhyme built in since they originate as oral "texts." The book's title beckoned to me from its spine with a crooked finger, already such a fantastic title for a poem. Dictionary of Riddles? Ah yes, that was the chapbook that won the Yale prize.
The elliptic and questioning structure of riddles also made this feel like "cheating." One of my writing habits (ruts? strategies?) is to pepper my text with questions. (See how how I did that?) Readers often tell me that I have a few questions too many. I don't know—WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Most answers to riddles are mundane: A clock. The wind. A belt. A horse taking a nap. I like that through this erasure, there emerges the sense of something sinister and likely monstrous. Some kind of trapped demon. The sun and the water and the noise all acting strangely. Or rather, their behaviors rendered strange.
I couldn't help photocopying at least 4 pages from this book, so there may be more mysteries from the dictionary of riddles still to come. Not least of which, a couple pages of answers, which just read like fantastical lists of randomly generated text. Yeah, this is definitely cheating.