An Older Volume
Closed,
and older still in memory
than forgotten ideas and other points of departure, a book
waits behind the centuries,
and seeks an unnamed reader, a student
of the mind’s eye,
perhaps advised by desire and poised
cautiously
with annotating pencil in-hand.
Full of scrawled lines, ships and ground, faces, and notes of authorship
no longer of meaning,
more hands than remembered
marked their wandering ideas and agreements,
inspired musings, and the impatience of objection,
here,
as excursions of text and conversation,
collective, always,
like the voice of curious thoughts,
there to bind brittle pages into a tome, another semblance
of intellectual form.
An older volume sweetly bears its scars, not alone
within a boundary of regret, but many times over with companions of choice,
readers of the moment,
travelers who happily wander its landscape of pages
and the shifting ground of so many ideas, waiting
under the debris of centuries.