Books

I have a problem with

Books.

No - not a problem 

where I want to complain about them

Like some of my students do. 

No. I just keep

Getting more of them

And keeping them.

And I usually have several going at once,

Like the Vaudeville guy 

With the table full of poles 

Who keeps a plat spinning 

Atop each of them.

A novel.

Or two.

A nonfiction book of useful information,

And a nonfiction book of supposedly useless

Yes fascinating information.

A science book.

A philosophical or theological book.

A book about teaching

(Aren’t they all).

All spinning.

And stacks and stacks more

Waiting

For when I finish one of the others,

Ready to fly into my hands

In front of my eyes.

And what exactly am I looking for?

Mere entertainment?

And why do I take some books out for another

Spin?

What am I looking for

In all those endless pages?

Well, a lot of things.

Fun and escape

And comfort and solace

And challenge and questioning

And shaking myself up

And inspiration

And grounding.

Because I have always found life

Or reality

Or whatever I’m living in

A little overwhelming,

A lot baffling.

My own small lens can’t take it all in,

To make sense out of it.

But books aren’t really spinning plates.

They are lenses.

And every book

Is another person’s attempt

To make a lens

And see some aspect of life

Clearly.

And if I have a enough lenses

Piled up and overlapping

And I keep looking through them

Maybe I can make some kind of sense of things

Instead of standing like the blind men in the poem

(In a book)

Saying the elephant is a

Tree or a rope or a snake

Because they have only touched one part

Of the whole

And assume they have experienced it all.

The books I’ve taken in

And digested

And the ones I’m still chewing on

And the ones still warming on the shelf

All hold this promise.

We can make sense of this mess.

Really.

If you look through enough people’s

Eyes and ears and minds,

One book at a time,

One page at a time,

One word at a time,

I keep hoping that

The plot of the world

Will come into focus.

Books keep me from being trapped in me,

From shrinking the world around me

To fit my own little point of view.

But they enlarge me, too, 

Giving me a wider set of lenses 

To view the world.