Secondhand Book
for A.B., first owner
Oil from your fingertips: the paper
drank it in. Traces of your body
vanished into the page that now
my own fingers trace, letting go
more of the oil that little by little
will dissolve the page, our human
touch eroding what we love, invisibly
and without sound. Or maybe
sound, only too small and far
from what we’re trained to hear.
If we had a keen
vision and feeling
of all ordinary life,
George Eliot wrote,
we should die of that
roar
which lives on the
other side
of silence. You
died; we
never met. I lifted your book
from the cardboard box where
it nested with the many others,
its pages already darkened at the edges
like the tulip in the vase, after ten days
falling wantonly away from its name.
On the flyleaf your name still
twines itself in sturdy blue, precise
river of script unbroken between
the letters’ valleys and slopes. What is it
makes me want to tell you
things I’ve never said before?
Inside my skull your other names
unspool: poet, reader, ghost. I touch
the place where your signature holds,
where paper is generous, shares a body
with trees that creak and sway
in any wind as if to prove they too
are touched. I trace your whole
name: here, pressed to a page the color
of beech leaves, overwintered. How
they murmur together, whisper
and hush and maybe roar. They know
the sounds I don’t, the ones that shape
the words I’d say, just now,
if I could, to you.
