The Reader

I had, as a child, the nasty habit of eating words right off the

page: whole rows of letters—even the angel-tipped serifs—

nibbled; the tiny curl ends of j and y, which gathered like

toast crumbs in the bindings, licked clean. My gaze would

fall on any phrase and falling—instinctively —grab hold;

holding naturally turned to tasting, tasting to chewing and so

forth. It seemed harmless enough. I was a child. Yet knowing

how memory serves its master, maybe I was rough or rude?

Why else would my sisters run to our mother complaining

that I’d erased their books again? Perhaps I gobbled and

gulped and wore the stains of gluttony on my face; where I’d

see myself a myopic visionary with the appetite of an escape

artist, they’d remember a greedy know-it-all who grabbed

their wishes before they could know them.

Truly mine was an indiscriminate hunger—the ubiquitous

cereal boxes, my mother’s novels—but the books my sisters

chose, or had assigned to them, did seem particularly…

available. I got there first, cracking spines like wishbones,

leaving pages splotched with grease, turning them opaque,

translucent when held to the light: they could have seen

what remains after reading, but I didn’t have the words to tell

them.

Here Is a Book                       

the impulse of its purchase
forgotten
a paperback
of course.
Unread because
sometimes
that happens
     My Abandonment
tossed into a donation box.
Who would deny the humor
and grief of a book?    

Bindings
The trick of a book made of paper:
a finger’s stroll along the library’s shelf
summons a purr of name and call number.
Spellbound a spark from a broken spine
opens to Ammon Shea’s words:
I’ve never looked across the room at my computer
and fondly remembered things that I once read in it.

In the intimacy of sun or lamp light
unremarked
the texture and heft
and that chaos of alphabet
which seems to travel silently
but must
like a train of thought
creak as it jostles, rumble as it rolls
beneath our hearing.

What happens when everything one knows
encounters a white field scattered with print?
Is it sugar and ants, the margins snow-cold and singing?

Our eyes, if suited to the task,
shimmy to the past of a sentence’s beginning
while slipping forward toward its future end,
the mind engaging in minute revisions.
However it be,
I say thank you to the page
when turning it.