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.