Obviously the shelves are never reasonable.
Just yesterday our guests knocked an overhanging pile
to the floor. The books are regularly conspiring
they want to make everything more precarious,
desperate for attention. Schemers,
they make your heart thump to remind you
readers are thrill seekers despite what everyone else
might warn about the importance of being outside.
Books are tricky they spill bindings in your lap
like gossip, then pretend they’re inanimate.
Go, they say softly, find us some tea and sunlight,
crack our spines into an afternoon.
They multiply keep acquiring and mating like with like
until they start to weigh each other down—
this is when I call in the fortune reader.
She likes to run her hands over books
treating herself to deckled edges and delighting
in embossing on dust jackets. There’s a dragon
hiding here, she tells me. A secret. A golem.
A ghost. This one is a veritable house party
wild nights and talking animals.
The possibilities slide off my shelves
until I have no choice but to hold the pages close.
When I lift the books open to smell the story,
I can’t always tell—what’s paper, what’s skin.
