(.............sept3) The Pleasure of Reading, a Kind of Miracle
It's 6: 30 AM and I sit
at a round, marble table
in a little cafe, the pleasant
Vivaldi in the background,
and I open my book:
'There had been a wind during the night,
and all the loneliness of the world
had swept up out of the southwest.'
The patter of words
augments my pleasure.
My mind loves
to step, word by word,
along a path
cleared by the mind of another.
I imagine diagramming the sentence,
adjectives and prepositional phrases
running down diagonals
from the base line of subject, object, verb,
a pleasant, straight flow
from begiinning to end.
My pleasure increases even more.
Maybe it's the illusion of control —
is that what we get from reading?
Instead of the great, dark abyss
of all possibility
from which to draw my next thought —
'I'm getting fat. The heater is humming. I like that
painting. Have to call mother. My wife'...
a road's lies paved and waiting.
The next sentence
in the story introduces a boy.
The boy hears the wind.
I can see him.
What magic is this?
From somewhere I don't understand
a picture forms, a story begins,
and in that same, created realm
it evolves, and now that boy,
that wind, are part of me.
Max Reif
http://www.poemhunter.com/
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