For National Poetry Month

Book Love
by Jerome Stern

I have just come from an exhibition
that told me that books
will be replaced by
electronic libraries,
talking videos,
interactive computers,
cd-roms with thousands of volumes,
gigabytes of memory dancing on
pixillated screens
at which we will blearily stare into eternity.

And so, in the face of the future,
I must sing the song of the book.

Nothing more voluptuous do I know
than sitting with bright pictures,
fat upon my lap,
and turning glossy pages of
giraffes and Gauguins,
penguins and pyramids.

I love wide atlases delineating
the rise and fall of empires,
the trade routes from Kashgar to Samarkand.

I love heavy dictionaries,
their tiny pictures,
complicated columns,
minute definitions of incarnative
and laniary, hagboat and fopdoodle.

I love the texture of pages,
the highgloss slickness of magazines
as slippery as oiled eels,
the soft nubble of old books,
delicate india paper,
so thin my hands tremble
trying to turn the fluttering dry leaves,
and the yellow cheap, coarse paper
of mystery novels so gripping that
I don't care that the plane circles Atlanta forever,
because it is a full moon
and I am stalking in the Arizona desert
a malevolent shape-shifter.

I love the feel of ink on the paper,
the shiny varnishes,
the silky lacquers,
the satiny mattes.

I love the press of letters in thick paper,
the roughness sizzles my fingers
with centuries of craft embedded in pulped old rags,
my hands caress the leather of old bindings
crumbling like ancient gentlemen.

The books I hold for their heft,
to riff their pages,
to smell their smoky dustiness,
the rise of time in my nostrils.

I love bookstores,
a perfect madness of opportunity,
a lavish feast eaten by walking up aisles,
and as fast as my hand reaches out,
I reveal books' intimate innards,
a doleful engraving of Charlotte Corday who murdered Marat,
a drawing of the 1914 T-head Stutz Bearcat
whose owners shouted at rivals,
"There never was a car worser than the Mercer."

I sing these pleasures of white paper and black ink,
of the small jab of the hard cover corner
at the edge of my diaphragm,
of the look of type,
of the flip of a page,
the sinful abandon of the turned down corner,
the reckless possessiveness of my marginal scrawl,
the cover picture-as much a part of the book
as the contents itself,
like Holden Caulfield his red cap turned backwards,
staring away from us,
at what we all thought
we should become.

And I also love those great fat Bibles evangelists wave like otter pelts,
the long graying sets of unreadable authors,
the tall books of babyhood enthusiastically crayoned,
the embossed covers of adolescence,
the tiny poetry anthologies you could slip in your pocket,
and the yellowing cookbooks of recipes
for glace blanche dupont and Argentine mocha toast,
their stains and spots souvenirs
of long evenings full of love and argument,
and the talk, like as not,
of books, books, books.