another inadequate sestina for Jonathan (from Way Stations):


SESTINA OF THE BOOK

         And once upon a time. . . she read to you,
 and all at once, time was a different time.
 A something you could feel – invisible,
 the way a breeze (when you were feverish)
 passed through the window and across your book
 and touched your forehead like an animal.

  
         The books taught you the name of every animal.
 As you forgot them, they remembered you –
 whispering come back, I am your favorite book
 just when they began to pass their time
 deriding you – the neighborhood gang (feverish
 with pride – tired of being invisible).

  
         They revealed the real world was invisible
 and beast was Adam's name for animal
 and there were herds of them, roaming feverish
 through history, lowing, howling for you
 – or for that shepherdess of fabulous time
 circling like a vision through your book. . .

  
         oh shepherdess of the smoothest book!
 You see her even now (she's invisible,
 but you see her) pirhouetting perfectly in time
 with the concert of the world – vegetable, animal,
 stones, stars, ocean, all dancing for you
 beneath her shadow, a sweet and feverish

  
         dance!  And it was wisdom to be feverish!
 As you drew closer, she was like a book
 unfolding a microscopic world for you –
 a globe of penetrating texture. . . visible
 inversions. . . tendrils of an animal
 unknown. . . the shell of involuted time!

  
         . . . so it wound, oblique, around your time,
 and whispered sea-foam until, feverish,
 you felt immersed inside that animal,
 a velvet valve, enfolded in a book.
 And you grew more and more invisible,
 and changed, and suffered no more – you

  
         who (once upon a time) had read a book
 while feverish boys (now all invisible,
 celestial animals) called out – hey you. . .

      
                                                           3.3.97