Selecting A Reader
First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.
Ted Kooser
I don't wish to have written this poem. I wish to be this poem.
I want the words etched in my paper skin. Not like a tattoo. Like each word beats inside my heart, one after another until the poem ends but doesn't because it always goes back to the beginning. As long as I'm alive.
I'm jealous because it feels like good Saturday mornings and the good kind of lonely afternoons and old bookshelves and memory-splattered raincoats and peaceful strolls and independence. Kooser's perfect reader is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. And I'm not there. And I'm not her. And I'm not words.
It will never end, but my Saturday will.
The words will never be erased, but I will.
Forever after I'm dead, please still let there be bookstores in the world. Please still let there be these beacons. Please still let there be these stars you can hold in your hand because you're just as burning and passionate and the heat doesn't faze you.
You're that star.
Dear Icarus,
You're not a white dwarf or a black dwarf or a neutron star or a black hole yet.
So stop acting like you are.
s t o p
s t o p
s t o p
s t o p
s t o p
s t o p
s t o p
stop.
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