1
You know how to read: beginning to end
you have a bookcase stuffed full
All that paper seems obscene,
obscenely dry and white
In the centre is a book you haven’t read yet
because summer was long and full
and although the light lasted forever
it always seemed to be night
This book is green and brown, like a bruise
and all the pages are blank
your fine fingers turn them one by one
You nod as if to say Of course, of course
I want to open it up and find food, snot,
smears and stains. I want to open you up,
high, floating above the city
The two of us tight-roping streetcar wires

2
I don’t read books. I read maps
The one I’ve given you is dog-earred, upside-down,
tacked to the wall above your kitchen table,
the language irrelevant and fading
It’s winter now, time to plot and navigate,
to calculate long days from inside the dark
I have traced possible paths with my fingertips
a straight line from hip to hip
Don’t look at me like that,
– with your head on my shoulder,
a soup bowl balanced on your knee –
as if you’re beside me now, as if you’re here
You are so healthy, but you could shatter
like a sluice of ice from the eaves

Originally published in White Wall Review 41 (2017)