Opening a book

A book is for more than reading

A book is for touching

With clean and dirty hands

Lovingly creasing the binding

Folding corners of pages to save them

Writing thoughts and flights of fancy

Or doodling

in the margins

A book is for refusing

To join the babbling by-plays

To tear away what my skin touches because life calls

A book is life

Lived as you recall or

As you could not live it

A book is life calling me

To follow Euterpe and Calliope

A book is for leaving

Before you are done

And waiting anxiously to finish

And starting again looking for new treasure in old veins

A book is a struggle that gives life meaning

The art of making something out of nothing

A burden you gladly carry

Because then you know it’s there

Waiting for your return

A book is for feeding

And leaving love signs of what you shared

Accidentally, distractedly

As you ate and read

Baptizing with drips of coffee or juice

Wrinkling the paper

Love signs

You can’t love a screen

If you fall asleep with it

It won’t warm you

Or open to pull you in

Through the night

It won’t reach out and call you

Back

And when you wake

It won’t be changed because of the time away

A book is more than words upon the page

Pictures between the words

Leaves yellowed with time

A book carries memories

The page that ripped when you couldn’t wait

To read the next page

The water stain when it fell in the puddle

After rain fell unexpectedly

And you weren’t looking because

In your mind

You were reading

The blue crayon scribbled across four pages

By a three-year-old who couldn’t know

Words have their own color and need no enhancement

When people die

Books remember them

If you touch their books

Or if they’ve touched yours

You have them

And feel the memory from their fingers through yours

A book is for more than reading