Classic Poem

I

In here, sunlight's fingers never forage.
For the most part, the exposed spines of shelved
paperbacks — perfect bound with low-wattage
fluorescence, a glue aglow — have been halved
by brutal cracks, those fault lines a careless
perusal rules into place. Yes, I dread
the eleventh grader who parted this
crisp copy of The Collector , who spread
it flat as a prized butterfly, leaning
his mind on two fine wings of Fowles's words
until the spine finally creased. Reading
eyes should light upon their leaf like small birds.
Books deserve the care of Golding's Piggy
cradling his conch, his democracy.

II

When judging books by cover, don't send down
Lennon's killer, The Catcher in the Rye
in pocket-sized paperback — Little Brown's
falsely accused suspect. Some covers lie
to readers, but not Salinger's, bound in
blank blurbless white, as nude as nuns' habits.
And though some fingers find cheap stock a sin,
Little Brown's thumb-blackening newsprint sits
well with my faith. Small as a Gideon
Bible — minus God, guilt, and gold edging —
the pallid paperback tends to darken
with every semester's fingerprinting,
but its soul isn't, as Holden would deem,
phony. Words, not their grimy covers, gleam.

III

Pity, piled in stacks for summer, One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , its cover
forced to read (over and over) blurbs on
the flush, pointblank backside of another.
The insane also learn to loathe themselves
by synopsis when stood on their edges
and lined up along reinforced steel shelves
like suicides manning their last ledges.
Novels, packed and pressed close together, fear
madness, fear Kurtz's horror the horror
as each UPC, confronting its rear
copy's cover, clangs shut like a cell door.
So shun fresh printings. Liberate the old.
Summer sentences color paper gold.

IV

Although novels must endure the summer,
some texts anticipate September fame.
A crude archivist, the inside cover
offers space to immortalize your name,
year, homeroom, crush — the opportunity
to enter history. Young signatures
are scrawled kinked knots — shoelaces hastily
snarled. I bested this book, they assure,
and unseam'd its theme. I strode with Macbeth
toward King Duncan's bed (while facing note
clarified Tarquin) and predicted death
for Piggy, sucked to sea like a small boat.
Holding the very thing Ray Bradbury
torched at four fifty-one, I felt lucky.

V

A previous reader's PC outrage
annotates this edition of Huck Finn .
The word " RACIST, " scrawled across every page
in red pencil, wends its way from margin
to margin, trying to rouse the type — straight
as a company of Confederates —
to lay down weapons and emancipate
the word " nigger, " typeset by bayonets.
It wants, that cry of racism, to spear
marching rows of imperialist text,
to stone, bottle and rain on riot gear,
exhume and lynch dead white Twains by their necks.
But if we excise all the books that prick,
how will Shylock bleed and prove anemic?