The volume’s trifling weight, a cloth edition picked up at a second-hand bookstore: dust dank, alligatored spine, the sweet sifting sound at each page’s turning. The touch of a book sometimes speaks as much as the words inside.
A theater ticket falls from the pages, printed on purple cardstock and neatly torn, used to mark a poem I was once interested in or the exact place where I left off reading. The W. D. Powell Theater. True West. Student directed. I had seen the play twice before in other towns, just like I’ve read these poems years ago, in another room, when I was of a different mind about nearly everything.
Same as you, I want to be prized out of this slender moment and dragged back to a misremembered sweetness, or swept nextwards after some unattainable state. How nice if an artifact would shake from the pages of every book we handle; how sweet if every good hour would leave some stain of evidence before evaporating to nothingness.
And here are Char’s poems, rich as a winter dish from a peasant kitchen, each one declaring its own careful architecture, simple as the sacraments, no light between word and contingency. It comes back to me, how I was a foreigner among them, observing their sure movements at some remove, like an audience at a play trying to access the interior reality beneath the stage makeup and out-sized gestures.
For a minute in the second act of the Shepard play I was let inside. From my seat at the back of the house I understood something about how a lost past will write itself from horizon to horizon. Char says to cast off life’s shabby accumulation, but who can let loose even of something as ephemeral as paper? If you’re lucky, a scrap of forgotten time will fly seed-like from the pages of a book you could never seem to finish, looking to lodge itself in some broken piece of ground.