Bookends
One end of
the dusty shelf
held upright
by a solid sculpture
of readings,
the other a vase
of dotted
flowers, clearly fake,
eternal
plumage.
My
beginning, traced through
the words of
comic books, then
Michael Crichton,
then Kurt Vonnegut,
whatever blared
at me on the shelf
or was
handed to me.
Colorful panels to creative words.
Lately, a
pile of textbooks, some
words
revisited, articles about study,
there are always
new terms to find.
New wisdom to open up and air out.
The Reading of Fiction
Updike never
sold me a day,
but I can
get lost in his descriptions.
Similarly,
pages of Faulkner can
bury me in
dialogue.
I can coast along the erasure
of a graphic novel about Derrida.
Or I can get
lost in Billy Collins’
description
of getting lost in a poem.
Or listen to the verse conversation
of James Tate.
Then what
race occurs
to construct
my own fiction, to view
and
understand the fictions others
are
creating, even as I walk by them,
even maybe about me.
Counting a Freedom
Story of an
elephant
felled, a
travel guide back
to reality,
trial after trial,
another
culture spread
through
words and syntax,
given the
hollow voice
of a native
tongue, thick
and still
rounded out,
a world I
have not seen,
a place I
have not been,
seeing my world in a new
lens at the last page.
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