To all you romantic bookworms…

Someone reminded me of this poem a moment ago, and I thought I’d share it with all of you.

Faithfully Dangerous #2: I Am Reading You

by Linford Detweiler

I am reading you.
Your Annie Dillard lips,
Kerouac thighs,
Flannery feet,
Dylan Thomas eyes.

I want to open you like a Charles Dickens novel,
A Tale of Two Cities,
412 pages long
and in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,
Ellen Foster,
Godric,
The Sonnets of Shakespeare,
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:
I enjoyed all these.

But I am pulling the words out of you now,
the two of us a run on sentence,
warm words on the tip of your tongue
and just beneath the smooth of your skin,
verbs from slender places
and nouns like the thousand different faces you are making
and the punctuation of your heart.

I have no use for adjectives:
my imagination is beneath you.

I am reading you with closed eyes,
uneven breath,
fluttering pulse,
the short and long vowel sounds
of birds flung skyward out of my bending thoughts,
the nest we found,
the praise we made,
our hideaway,
our prepositional phrase.

I am reading you.
Hands on your dust jacket,
my acquisition,
my superbly illustrated girl
in a slightly worn binding,
each blink a handpainted portrait
recording the most important discovery
that you and I will ever make.

Royal folio,
slim octavo,
later full red crushed morocco,
raised bands,
uncut marbled endpapers,
custom cloth slipcase and chemise,
small quarto,
modern buckram,
clamshell box.

Yes.

And I am reading you
woman
like the first book of the vinegar Bible,
wondering why God so loved the world
that he gave you
to me
for these few fleet moments
to be my only begotten son,
my first real taste of everlasting life.

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2 Comments

  1. Recently I had to pull the MSDS for “morocco red.” That sucker wudn’t easy to find, let me tell you!

  2. Recently I had to pull the MSDS for “morocco red.” That sucker wudn’t easy to find, let me tell you!

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