On my shelves today I discovered
a collection of poems that I gave you on your 21st birthday
the inscription reveals me as a young man
intimidated by the implications of such a gift
Do you remember?
I was coming back from out of town.
There were two volumes and I didn’t have time to wrap either of them.
This one, I signed
This one, I signed
“xo,”
The other
"Love,”
so that when I told you only a week later
it was half the surprise it would have been
I guess it got back into my possession
during the days it slept on the bedside table next to us,
with your Garrison Keillor sonnets and a copy of The Waves
that I stole from my brother only to douse in cheap wine.
What stands out to me now, though,
is none of these things
but instead the large margins
left blank at the bottom of each page
that make it so hard to tell
when a poem is truly finished
they say,
“keep reading,
keep reading.
meaning is never fixed
by the end of a line, a stanza, or a day
so that when I told you only a week later
it was half the surprise it would have been
I guess it got back into my possession
during the days it slept on the bedside table next to us,
with your Garrison Keillor sonnets and a copy of The Waves
that I stole from my brother only to douse in cheap wine.
What stands out to me now, though,
is none of these things
but instead the large margins
left blank at the bottom of each page
that make it so hard to tell
when a poem is truly finished
they say,
“keep reading,
keep reading.
meaning is never fixed
by the end of a line, a stanza, or a day
but by the end of it all.”
No comments:
Post a Comment