David Koehn appears in the archive with Some Lines Written with Invisible Ink, preserved in the twenty-third installment. The poem presents a numbered sequence in which only certain entries are visible: one, two, six, seven, eight, and ten. The missing numbers create conspicuous spaces inside the work. Around those gaps, Koehn places children, a rock garden, stone cutting, diminishing growth, fish bones, sand, stained glass, and a final statement about the distance of heaven.
Invisible ink and visible gaps
The title immediately changes the reader’s relation to the sequence. The visible numbering suggests a larger set of lines, and the absent entries make invisibility structural. Numbers three through five and nine are present through expectation: readers can see where they belong even though no text occupies those positions.
This use of absence gives Koehn a distinctive place within experimental poetry. Blankness becomes active information, and the sequence invites attention to what a page withholds as carefully as to what it displays.
Children and stone
The opening fragments introduce two children entering a rock garden, followed by an exit described in the singular. The next visible entry defines a chiseler through both childhood and stone cutting. These compact statements make identity and material feel unstable from the beginning.
Readers exploring poetry can follow how Koehn creates pressure through extreme compression. Each numbered sentence resembles an isolated proposition, and its relation to neighboring entries remains partly open.
Sand and fish bones
Later fragments move from stone to sand and introduce an enormous hidden history inside a tiny material unit. A grain of sand is imagined as containing millions of fish bones. The image changes scale dramatically, placing microscopic perception beside geological and biological time.
Within modern poetry, this movement between scientific suggestion and imaginative assertion creates a compact metaphysical field. Stone, sand, bone, growth, and decay become materials through which the poem measures time.
The stained-glass question
One visible line asks how many fish are in a stained-glass window. The question shifts the sequence from physical remains to representation. Fish can exist as bones in sand, as living creatures imagined through history, and as figures held in colored glass. The poem’s objects move between matter and image.
Readers interested in poetic forms can approach the numbered structure as a series of discrete verbal panels. Each fragment stands apart, and the omitted numbers create additional silent panels between them.
Heaven and distance
The tenth entry closes the visible sequence with a short declaration that heaven is far away. After stone, sand, bones, glass, and missing lines, distance becomes the final measure. The statement is spare enough to carry several possible resonances while remaining firmly grounded in the poem’s language of remoteness and absence.
Reading David Koehn
Some Lines Written with Invisible Ink builds its force through compression and omission. The numbering provides order, the gaps interrupt that order, and the surviving fragments repeatedly move between physical matter and larger questions of time, representation, disappearance, and distance.
Within contemporary poetry, David Koehn’s archived contribution offers a concise study of how absence can shape reading. The poem’s visible lines remain memorable because the missing positions are equally present in its design, giving invisible ink a formal life on the page.