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.