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THE BOOK COVER
I hadn't expected to find that fourth-grade book buried among the random hoard of things I keep. But there it lay, in the silverfish dark of a backroom closet between some brittling Marvel Comics, alluringly Pandoric in its plain, but creased brown cover. How the leaves creaked open in my hands to reveal the pious dust of poems! The unstilled pulse of their meters! All the childhood greats dragooned and marching beneath the banner of a bishop's imprimatur- safe for Catholic schools. Poor catechized child that I was, I can still set my rusty rote of Keats cranking: To know the change and feel it, When there is none to heal it... which seems downright ungodly to me now. But that prophylactic cover, more suggestive of porn than prosody, fanned out across my palms like rank petals and set free again two pent-up, feuding ghosts. That far September, my mother in her housedress worked at the kitchen table to save us a nickel, scissoring a cover from a grocery bag she would have used for garbage. I sensed the risk and should have, too, the arrogance of that nun, rigid with a pride I know now only avowed poverty can engender, who ordered all books be covered with the crested, laminate sheets that only the sisters sold. With that stiff spined book before me, its printer's ink fresh- scented with a hint of bread, I sat upright ready for Sister Williams's inspection . . . and feel again the sting of that woman's slap to rebuke my mother's handiwork. Who refused to strip the cover away -this demotic brown-the wonder of it-like stable hay? Unchanged, it keeps unfouled that half- forgotten floor where healing words stammered and yet were born.