The Fountainhead: A poem on my love of books

After working on the formatting for this for a couple of hours, since I am no HTML wizard, finally I have the poem for today’s WordSmith Wednesday. Hope you enjoy, especially after all the work to get it here. :)

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year, as every year, was to read more books. I love books, but don’t have enough, well, make enough, time to read the ones I’d like to read. I composed this poem a few years ago as a reflection on my lifelong love of books:

The Fountainhead

— after smelling a dusty copy of a John McPhee book
I picked up at the library for 50 cents

1.

I was biking down
the Marsh Creek Road
that day when I spied it,
lying there, cover ripped off,
inviting me to stop
and pick it up.

Inside its pages was
a story of
the architectural superiority
of man, how he had built
skyscrapers to show
his greatness.

I stooped down and
learned to what heights
men could climb.

Later reading Jon Krakauer,
I learned of men
who failed to attain such
heights alive,

but for now,
with one bare knee in the dirt,
as I read her philosophical objectivism,

I chose not think of how
from dust I had come,
to dust I would return.

I let my thoughts soar higher.

2.

Or inside its pages was
a song not of myself, but of America
free,

of Texas gaining its independence,

of Alaska and Hawaii,
and even farther out

space, the final frontier

of California

and its Valley of the Dolls.

We thumb through the lurid details of the lives

of others, celebrities like
they were going out of fashion, lurid details

that is, but they’re not,

they are so chic, so in
the moment, so…so….
(“a man breathes deep into his saxophone”)
American.

3.

From a satellite, I see that boy kneeling
beside the back road, wish
I could be like him.
I need to be like him,
in love with the printed word,

(like my neighbor John,
who has to print out
articles from the Internet he wants to read

– he has to touch them, feel their weight,

their heft

to make it a corporeal

presence

like ink smudging on your fingers
after reading a newspaper)

not the digitized code
a poem like this breaks down into eons later.