I Made a Book

I made a book,

made the pages
from cheap, lined paper stolen from school,
from the torrid leaflet left under the windshield wipers
by Holy Rollers in the parking lot, from squares
of plain cardboard

released from the clutches of mother's pantyhose,
glued in a few modest wafers smuggled from
sacrament for my introduction
and illuminated capital G's and M's (for 'Going...' and
'Moreover...') with the lock
of my sister's once long hair, illuminated with curls
of white birch bark from winter,
and borrowed its central mystery from the Avon catalogue's
more scented pages,

stole a kind of heat from
the Avon Lady's ashtray full
of Taffeta Sunset-ringed butts,
stole my heroine from sheets of mica
near the pond illuminated
from within I swear, and borrowed
enemies from the smooth slate of the river bottom
where it never quite freezes
while I colored my book with the flush
of a rabbit's ear
and glued-in four leaf clovers, Bible-pressed, frail,

and pages and more pages--
of ice, of the wasted softness
in my father's hands, a scab, a bull's horn
heated and flattened out, to make a comb

and a page for my book, the skin of dust
on the TV was included to symbolize frailty,
the wrapper from a hamburger to suggest
the pain of forgetting
baby teeth became page

numbers, also figures for greed,
dry fronds--last Palm Sunday's--unbraided, removed
from above the door became the spine, our grandfather's
handkerchief and his face
when he beat the dogs were spread thick

to dry and then cut to shape for the spine, as was the steam
off the swamp or fluff off dandelions,
the damp, gray haze from winter noons that
I could almost gather in my arms like an animal or a child, and
the delicate ampersand of cooked sugar
cooled on snow.


Connie Voisine
Posted over on Sante Fe Poetry Broadside