Prospector
I find cries
where they were words:
in a lung.
I give the remains to a book,
work all night.
Gedichte zum Thema: book
Gedichte zum Thema „book“ auf Poets.by.
Longing
all morning in books
and other places
a far face
Book lovers
this intimacy
is with books
I read to her
and she to me
she gone
I read to myself in bed
reading a poem
I brought home with me
last night
from the war
Bibliophile
All morning in a book—
and then heat,
a woman,
my yard.
I found the earth
as it is now: enlarged.
Snowfall
The slow and steady
accumulation of snow
making everything strange
reminds me of my father
reading aloud to the family
from a book in his lap,
the whisper of pages turning,
each of us building a picture
all our own.
Asterisk
To be small is to be distant
& vice versa.
The asterisk calls.
It leaves a message.
You turn it all the way up:
it sounds like a small fan.
In some parallel universe
all the stars look like this
& books with too many footnotes
collapse into black holes.
Book Match
Back when I smoked, as the son of a writer
& a librarian, the book match
was like a brother to me.
Once torn from the book
it couldn’t go back, while smoking made me
an exile from the air.
We both had a tendency to lose our heads.
I was skinny as a heron’s leg;
a book match isn’t even thick enough
to qualify as a match stick.
It’s a minimal page
with just enough room for one word
beginning with a lower-case L
& ending with incandescence—
a holy word, a profane word,
a word for (forgive me) a kind of match.
Death of the Author
A small pin-striped bird alights
on the dead cherry tree next to the porch
& starts gleaning its breakfast
from crevasses in the decaying wood.
At length I remember its name,
black-and-white warbler—
& in so doing, forget the name of the author
whose Collected Shorter Poems I hold
in my lap. They’re orphaned for more
than a minute by my poor memory.
If I can just get the first letter…
something beginning with a G, perhaps?
That letter like a smile
warped into a grimace…
Or a T, that tall gallows.
The warbler stops to issue his usual
Book-burning
The fire is a thorough & voracious reader.
Page by page my old manuscript turns gray & brittle
& when the mist thickens into rain,
the smoking pile emits a long thin sigh.
Reader
called to observe like a guard at a gallery
the art refusing to be quiet
I look over it all and let it go
my books collect time
my mind in good condition
for venturing into the world
The Reasons I like You
I kinda like your eyes.
They shimmer like the stars.
I really love your voice,
Cause I'm the only one who gets it.
Your hair looks really soft,
Maybe soon you'll let me touch it?
You haven't called me weird yet,
Which a lot of people do.
We both like random music,
So I'd love it if we jammed.
You said your siblings were annoying,
Mine are like that too.
Even with the mask on
You have a pretty face.
And when your eyes scrunched cause you smiled
I felt my heart begin to race.
* * *
I am pieces of quotes
From my favorite books
Stitched together by midnight conversations
And the sweet taste of Tea
I have this tendency
to fall apart suddenly
And i need you to be okay with this
Because am created by the souls
Who are brave enough
To gather all my tattered pieces
And put me back together!