Riddle

Useful friction, slender leaf among leaves, I divide the seen from the unseen like some haphazard stand-in for the present.

Though I may bear an epigraph, my true purpose is to stand watch over silence like a caesura, or a rest in a score. I’m a solitary scarecrow buried up to its neck in a field of white, warding off the crows of forgetfulness, which are also (of course) white as a blank page.

I mark where the mind left off, where the lips ceased their murmur, where the eyes fell shut. My exact form is incidental, so long as I am flat as the tongue of an angel, for whom all flavors are one, & sturdy as the hope of continuance.

We meet often, you and I, but only under the covers. You use me & set me aside. In a previous life, I may have been a paperclip, a shopping list, a postcard, the receipt from a cash register — some briefly useful crutch. Riddle me.