I don't remember what we read.

Too many books have fallen

into the gap of years.

 

I remember her body,

her lap,

her arm reaching

across me in a half embrace

as she pointed at something

and said the word.

"Kitty."

"Birdie."

Or reached to turn the page.

​

She knew their names.

​

Just us, the table lamp,

and Marianne asleep in her crib.

Listening without knowing it.

 

That was before my two brothers came along,

and Margaret.

 

Maybe it's a false memory.

 

You understand. I can hang it

in the hallway leading to the back,

at the precise spot,

but it's too dark at that end

to see clearly.

 

Mine had pictures. My mother's

did not. Ranged on shelves

in a corner of the living room,

their faux-leather spines closed ranks

like a palisade.

Later, when I began reading for myself,

I would open them.

Once she caught me.

They weren't for children, she said.

Even then, halfway through Woodland Elementary,

I knew they were about what men and women do

when no children are around.

 

They had titles, and words

that had to be names

because they were meaningless.

 

Hemingway.

Carr.

Sallinger.

O'Connor.

 

When there got to be five of us

she would let us loose

at the public library behind the A&P parking lot.

Except for Margaret and Bill.

They were too young.

She kept them in the cart

while she shopped for groceries.

 

We pretended the library was a ship about to sail.

 

My favorite books were the Dr. Doolittles.

 

Was it the idea of animal languages?

 

One time she brought back the first volume

of the Golden Book Encyclopedia, "Aardvark to Army."

It was in a display at the checkout.

 

Each week she brought back another.

 

I don't remember the words.

 

I remember the covers.

 

Trompe l'oeils

of things sharing only

a common sound of inception:

Aristotle, apple, abacus, arrow, amphibian.

 

No people. Just pictures of them. Or statues.

 

Each thing cast a shadow.

The pictures cast shadows.

The statues cast shadows.

 

I would stare at those covers for minutes at a time,

imagining myself exploring

the out-sized props of a stage set--

Gulliver climbing a microscope to look down the eyepiece,

Tom Thumb swashbuckling before an illustration

of plankton pinned to a wall,

or beneath a branch of olives sagging into a proscenium arch,

or a giant pair of brass scales hovering

above a shelf full of sand.

 

Leaf, lightning, Robert E. Lee, locomotive.

 

No one near to point

and speak the name.

​

Uninhabited.
 

My own.