11-03-2023, 09:37 PM
Every book chooses its own favorite place,
For Lord of the Rings, it was a rainy autumn,
Steppenwolf, an incense filled teenager’s bedroom,
Conan the Conqueror, the rocky ledges of a lake,
The Magic Mountain, my father-in-law’s library,
The Cantos, the mountains of southern Colorado,
Naked Lunch, the porch of a cabin in the Sangre de Christos,
Son of the Morning Star, the imagined hills above the Little Big Horn
stripped and mutilated bodies scattered white in the sun,
the Sioux, a cloud of dust, moving west and into history.
Sometimes the book makes its own place.
For Lord of the Rings, it was a rainy autumn,
Steppenwolf, an incense filled teenager’s bedroom,
Conan the Conqueror, the rocky ledges of a lake,
The Magic Mountain, my father-in-law’s library,
The Cantos, the mountains of southern Colorado,
Naked Lunch, the porch of a cabin in the Sangre de Christos,
Son of the Morning Star, the imagined hills above the Little Big Horn
stripped and mutilated bodies scattered white in the sun,
the Sioux, a cloud of dust, moving west and into history.
Sometimes the book makes its own place.