DISTRACTION

He wakes up every day and reads

most days only for a few minutes

before he has to work the fields.

He always plans to read more

before he goes to sleep but

the candlelight and exhaustion

put the plan neatly away.

He hates the reading,

wonders if he should find

something other than Great Expectations.

But he doesn’t have

any other books,

and he thinks of reading

like he thinks of church.

And one Sunday after sleeping

through the sermon,

he comes home and picks up

his one book.

He finds his place

planning to read just

those few minutes

but goes on and on.

The line that gets him

is about how “our worst

weaknesses and meanness”

are “for the sake of” those

“we most despise.”

He reads it over and over

and then goes on intent

on making sense of the words

and finding that they make their own.

After a while he stops to consider

beginning the entire book again

feeling he’s missed too much

but he goes back to where he left off.

The next day in the field he puts

everything he sees into silent words

and that night he reads for the first time

before falling asleep.

The next day in the field he describes

to himself his feelings about his work

and later holds things in their places

with words as he moves around in time.

The words are the only constant,

as even their objects can shift

through his life, childhood,

senility, and through the life of the land.

He wants to write down his days on paper

because he believes if he does then he can

go anywhere, do anything, and yet still

there he’ll be.

It’s not that Dickens was right that got him,

but that he was wrong—

even Pip must’ve known his worst

wasn’t for anyone but Estella,

nor his best.

One day could stretch to a whole

book of bound pages like the one

in his hands, or it could start and finish

on just one.

He imagines writing right over

the grand typeset words of Dickens'

on page one, “Hard to believe,

I woke up, excited to read.

I wished I could keep reading all day.”

Sunday, June 22, 2008, 11:43 am.

Also read:

Secret Dancers

And:

Gracie - Invisible Fences