𝓑𝓸𝓸𝓴𝓼

From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
I can hear the library humming in the night,
an immense choir of authors muttering in their books
along the unlit, alphabetic shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into him own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

I picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted to the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
He moves from paragraph to paragraph
as if touring a house of endless, paneled  rooms.

I hear the voice of my mother reading to me
from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,
and if her voice like other distant sounds,
the horror of a stable ablaze in the night,
a bark that is moving to the brick of speech.

I watch myself building bookshelves in college,
walls within walls, as rain soak New England,
or standing in a bookstore in a trendy coat.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining circles of light to find more light
until the line of woods becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow;

when evening is shadowing the forest,
small brown birds flutter to consume them
and we all listen hard to hear the voices
of the boy and his sister receding into the perilous woods.