Peninsula Friends of the Library

A librarian friend e-mailed the following poem which she saw in a library publication. I’d like to give it attribution, but haven’t been able to find it. Enjoy.

You make me leave the house hungry and unshowered, clutching your covers, one foot barely before the other. The little voyage from my house to the office a thousand days long. When the life of your words is too much to bear I halt, breathe, and try to hush the background buzz of people and cars and feet all striding confidently somewhere. I abandon your words to my mind, I let them invade me. I devour them one by one, or in dozens, or in herds and flocks and floods. Suck on them like on roasted ribs, turning them this way and that in my mouth, and when nothing is left, lick my fingers with heavy joy. You make me stop on the street, on the corner, on the stairs – perhaps sit shielded from the wind in some building, on my way to somewhere, now I forget where… You make me almost perish under the wheels of a brand new pick-up truck (No need to yell, Mister, can’t you see I’m in love?). I admonish myself for wanting to flare ahead – wanting to have all of your words all at once; chide myself for losing the most delicious details in my great hunger. I cover the next paragraph, the following page with my palm and laugh at myself for with giddiness of a child knowing she will have her cake, and have it, and have it, and will have her cake and eat it too. I finish you (as if there is such a thing, an end of you) sitting in my office. And then close your covers and smile – all that, all that, before my morning coffee.