Wisdom Poem by Caroline Misner

I’ve dropped your book in water,
the pages having long since abandoned
the spine, the glue
being too friable to hold it all together:

a hinge, a hinge
couldn’t hold it all in.
And now the pages have plumped
fat as a phonebook, the greased
black etchings,
indecipherable as hieroglyphics,
bloated and blurred:

a bird’s black wing, an eye,
a feather, a jewel,
misrepresentations, esoteric and unreal.

I need the darkness to compose
whatever letters climb these wrinkled
pages, all slush and detection.
Water erases them to blankness,
symbols faded like squandered dreams,
wasted wisdom:

she speaks of herself highly;
her muse appears at every hour.