And most of the time she reads.
As if someone broke her heart and she fled into a book
And she no longer needs
His love. Or the laughter love engenders. Look!
Love could be here, but books
Say love is absent. Looks
Lovers send are missing on page
After page, where writers journey, age after age,
Losing their imaginary loves. I can name
The most famous: Beatrice. Dante brought Beatrice fame
Because to her memory he imaginatively wrote
All the beauty we might hear in a musical note,
Sighing to us before it melts away
In one of those old songs a scratchy LP might play
When an old record player, with a needle still sharp,
Hums into action, and produces the sound of the trembling harp.
The mechanical conditions for music must be just right.
A lovely woman who madly reads is considered the perfect gem.
Look at the guys trying to see what book she’s reading but she doesn’t see them.
A person will remove their glasses before they retire at night,
But I think she keeps her glasses on, and there, by the lamp, in bed, she reads,
And she’s missing someone, someone who once read aloud to her—whom she hardly needs.
