Into The World Of Books

From the heart of this dark campus, 

I heard the library humming in the night,

An immense choir of authors muttering inside their books,

Along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,

Giovanni next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each stitched into his own book,

together formed a low, gigantic orchestra.

I pictured a figure in the act of reading with

shoes on a desk, engrossed in the book,

 a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie as the suicide of lovers saturates the page, or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.

He moves from paragraph to paragraph as if touring a house of endless rooms.

I heard my mother's voice reading out to me,

books about horses and dogs,

and inside her voice, lay other distant sounds, the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,

a bark, moving toward the brink of speech.

I watched myself building bookshelves in college,

walls within walls, as rain soaked the land, or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.

I see all of us reading ourselves away,

straining in circles of light to find lighter until the line of words becomes a trail of breadcrumbs,

we follow across a page of fresh snow.

When evening is shadowing the forest,

small birds flutter down to have them

and there are the voices of the boy and his sister receding into the perilous woods.