BOOKS
They line the walls on sagging lumber
beyond the five-foot shelf of classics.
Dog-eared paperbacks, debris
depicting what the demi-monde
contains within their shop-worn boards,
tomes we saved from e-Bay culls
that could have paid the urgent rent.
They stand like towers from a city
tinted in Morocco red,
a mystical mandala with
a text to read for souls in flames.
A row of narrow townhouses
lining the banks of a Dutch canal.
Beside them stacks of common fiction,
whose words would not improve on silence.
Here a history of life the sea
surrendered smells like tidal pools,
its pages soft and curled in waves.
In some we think a firewall
divides the character and author;
in some the writer is transformed.
A few of even those we love
were books that someone closely read
before they called authorities,
reporting on their hunted neighbors
for crimes against conformity.
Other volumes, spare and slim,
help to lip-read what my heart
is saying. Everyone it seems
knows the standard temperature
at which the printed paper burns.
But what about the low degree
that makes such standard pages freeze?
For there are books I have not sold
or tossed that press me down to death.
They stand and watch me from the shelf.
In those you gave as gifts a hundred
paper cuts await my blood.
About the Author: Royal Rhodes, who was trained in the Classics, is a retired educator who taught classes in global religions and Death & Dying for almost forty years. His poems have appeared in: Ekstasis Poetry, Snakeskin Poetry, The Montreal Review, The Cafe Review, and other places. His poetry/art collaborations have been published with The Catbird [on the Yadkin] Press in North Carolina.
Image Credit: John Frederick Peto “Still Life with Books, Inkpot, and Candlestick” Public domain image courtesy of Artvee.
As It Ought To Be 