The Trinity Of Books Poem by Leslie Philibert

We must unlearn the habit of reading; there is more,
the coffee stains and the sand from that beach in Crete,
the buying, the warm cover and the pages that now smell sour,
the bill from a plumber long cried over, the pencilled
annotations of imagined wisdom. And the soul behind;
the standing at windows at night, the finding in rooms
without movement, the unreturned questions, the distance.
The rest? - an unfinished spirit, an idea that once seemed good,
a last page not a full stop - the resignation of reaching
the end of a story in the night.