The Book

Before I came into the air from my mother,

I breathed her water.

Below any temple steps, there is always a beggar

who having renounced the world, seeks forms of direction.

Blind sometimes, or in ecstasy,

the book has become not a book.

Sometimes I wake up starving.

It is hard to know when to eat.

The page, square cover, sewn edge, table edge,

my weak sense of direction, collapsing to smoke.

When I wake like this, when neither the dream nor the day

have ruptured themselves into belief, the book unbuckles

and I think all of life is by faith only, that we are never delivered

from original water, that we are all a single equation

that approaches the axis, never arrives.