Lying in Bed with a Book

The book on top, a lover
staring into my eyes.
The wind outside fails to turn
the pages of this book.
Coffee on a nightstand,
its surface unruffled
by the story of terror in war.
In a great stillness,
the pages under my moving fingers
roll a dessicated thunder
across my sky.
The tree in the bed,
the shade of a disembodied, leafing voice.
I dreamt once of grafting a book,
pulpy extremity of the body,
onto my wrist.
From buried and paginated
heart to hand, from hand to eye,
from eye to brain, from brain to
beating and unsignatured
heart—so goes the bed's song
of a circulating energy,
invisible dust devil
on the Great Plains of the quilt.
Beside the bed, a community of absences
stacked up, waiting to be heard.
Now the linden outside the window leans in,
begging me to read out loud.
When I'm done with each word,
it gets up off the page
and lies down beside me in the bed;
soon I am surrounded by burrowing
words, who fall asleep before I do
and leave me alone under covers
like words in a book myself.
Bury me with books,
all of them cracked wide open.
No satin, only the feel of this legible
dry skin under my cold fingers.
Be sure my head is propped a little,
next to a reading light.

~ ~ Philip Dacey