30.03.00 : living in books/this poet

Thur.30th March

Two floors, their invisible staircase
crouching muscularly, an old wall,
unusually high, interwoven
like the materials for a nest,
the airtight sensation of slates:
all as gracefully apart as a calvary
from a crib or the woman
born in my sleep from the stranger me
that is satisfied by any name of a saint.

This poet lives in a book. Actually, she lives in hundreds, perhaps (frighteningly for the scholarly slute) thousands. For her, the opening of a book is the beginning of a conversation with its inhabitant; she's easy to get on with, so they usually invite her in for 165,000 words or so. She crouches in-between the pages; the architecture isn't what it used to be, you know. According to custom, the occupants (now her lifelong friends) give her gifts - words - which she uses to construct her own houses. These gifts become interwoven like materials for a nest - she relocates them, places their words in different sequences, thereby making her own original creation. No cheap reproductions here. But it is difficult to allow people into the conversation when it is so very intimate, almost in code. It takes years to find the book she's living in - we can't look it up in the phonebook. And anyway, she's moved by the time we find her. But still, she has made the preliminary introductions for you, making it easier for you to enter into that selfsame book.

Shane