For-a-Second

Reading and reading, the way we live,
A hundred thousand sentences a day,
More if you look closer.
I stream through places,
In my books, in my head, in the world,
Here “a short ridge eight or so feet tall”,
Here an orange dirt lane pressed between the sacred valley, obscured in darkness,
Here white chalk stone, pine forest through a bus window, panels of the azure Aegean between their backs,
Here peach blossom and the tang of hops in the Cairns marina as eyes lovingly look up at me,
Have you ever stopped and made particular note of something?
Something you wouldn’t have before,
A nook in the curlbarked toe of a tree,
An oval of moss on a drystone wall,
Something often even banal, the stone of the wall itself,
a piece of parquet flooring, a flag underfoot as you walk in the street,
the red clover mites in its seams,
But you stop, stop your streaming through the endless sentences
and for a moment make a little home,
a place where you and it and this are real,
Where you group your eyes and fingers up against the thing, the words,
the meaning, the image,
the print on the page, the knowing it is paper,
the polyps in its sheet-wood texture,
“a short ridge eight or so feet tall,”
curl into its serifs safe as a child,
and remember.