The beak was bronze
the book was brown
hidden in a corner
dried out by time
the print too small to read

2.
A house is a tumulus
left by an ancient population
yourself five years ago
or more, or less, the winds
of time don’t care.
You’ll never find yourself in there.

3.
The beak shines still a little
what is it really
handle or hook
you’re half-afraid to pick it up,
a bird stiff as an umbrella
with its folded wings,
the print too fine
for the words it carries,
whispered into the dust,
every word a foreign language.

4.
The leather spine has fallen off,
dimly gold stamped in
Les Langues du Monde.
The book I’m looking for
nowhere to be found.

5.
That’s an oldish way of saying it
but saying’s on the old side too.
Mostly we stare at things
and wait for them to speak.

6.
Of course we belong to the house.
Man sounds like Moon.
Sun sounds like Nun,
a holy woman married
only to the One.

We make the house
the house makes us—
sounds like a children’s game
and we can’t grow up.

7.
I was looking for a book in Latin
to lend a friend, Ausonius
on his river but I found
a Bible instead. Same language,
different river. Rivers.
Come, wash yourself clean.

8.
So it doesn’t make sense
to look for what you have
or thought you had. Looking
is a quest and should be saved
for the unlikely, the distant,
the absent, the never happened.

9.
Looking for something
you don’t know what you’ll find
don’t know what you’ve found
and it’s always too dark to tell.
It’s like going to school again,
that time where we all sat around
discussing books we hadn’t read
the right way at all, not at all.

10.
So I shouldn’t have bothered looking.
If the book’s so smart
let it find me.
It can read itself
in perfect dark
better than I can
with all the watts.
I look out the window and realize
state law requires all vehicles
to use headlights even in daytime.
And now I know why.
The mind of a driver is always dark,
like someone reading a missing book.
8 May 2021