This is a classic example of a poem arising from an ambiguous nowhere and ending up in an ambiguous somewhere. The poem is raw material going forward, but also fired clay in its current iteration or maybe a snapshot. Hard to explain, but it goes a way toward demonstrating why so many poets can’t release their poems into the wild. There is a contradiction. The poem feels finished and unfinished at the same time. Perfectly imperfect. I include my first “post-it” draft in the image below by way of an example.

A Vision of Books in the Dark

Sitting in the dark
with so many books
I touch their faces,
their spines,
their forwards,
their indices…gently.
Some of them
I will likely never honor completely,
yet they touch me back,
haptic & holy,
saying…well…
they all say something different to me,
a flood of voices,
variations on a theme,
a soothing torrent that is the same silver tease,
“Hush, it will soon be over.”
And I echo to them,
“Yes, it will.”