Spines

Pablo Neruda! I look for you my whole life; I catch a glimpse of you. I can’t afford you so I copy you. I search still, holed up with my words in private corners between stacks. Call number in hand, I look up to one title with your name, right in the P's and Q's of the hidden fourth floor. Another is next to you; another by that other, and many past them. The Ships! The Son! There are many of you and they continue to expand, they expand for two whole stacks of shelves, all full of you! My heart fills and drains, opens empty and wide, the gap for your closing and before I have even stretched a single vertebrae along the bumps of your spine I am afraid to touch. So I watch the microscopic rhythm of the threads that have bound you, pay reverence to the faded spots of color, loss. I was you, once, and bits of that soul are in me still.

And so I hid you and I hope you’ll understand.

© Jennifer Chaussee

 

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