The Invisible Book

Lat summer, I wrote a series of small poems called The Invisible Book. The idea was that behind every book of poems, there's an invisible or shadow book--like the long shadow a pebble leaves on a dirt road at dusk. I selected and revised 16 of the 40 poems I'd written, choosing them on the basis of whether I could feel 'the shadow', or subconscious inside them. The poems are printed below.

THE INVISIBLE BOOK


The invisible book
writes itself
whether we know it or not.
It's in love with the small things we abandon.

*

I like sentences that begin with rain
and end in silence.
The stones love it too,
and the white rabbit feeding at the edge of the field.

*

Heaven can wait.
But I seem to find it
in the fox sparrows
kicking up bugs from the leaves.

*

No one knows when the last word will come.
That's why I talk so much.
Let's spend the rest of the day with a stone Buddha,
who is always silent, always aware.

*

I can deal with silence, and age,
two or three books on my shelf.
I want to wander with Rilke near the dark roses.
I want to tell Hesse our homesickness will never end.

*

I'd like to take a little walk
that ends at water.
All the roads inside me
are turning to sand.

*

The earth breathes evenly,
takes everything inside: the bones
of a vole, the blue shadow hiding
inside an empty shell.

*

The brook sound reminds me
of the earth's hands,
holding everything steady.
What catches the earth when it falls?

*

I want to be playful with the light,
show it my shadow in late afternoon.
At night I am the lone presence
moving from room to room.

*

Night comes. The whole field
is soaked through with dew.
Lovers don't mind: they spend
the night wrapped in a cocoon of light.

*

3 am. I step outside to take in
the moon, the clouds, a little wind.
Someone keeps changing my name,
and the small things I fall in love with.

*

Don't worry,
someone looks over us.
It would be a shame if the world
were a garden where nothing ever grew.

*

I am the voice that never leaves you.
I am the hand that never sleeps.
I am the voice of the wild grass ripening,
the light inside the light.

*

It's a good thing that the earth
shakes itself now and then, like a giant
waking from sleep. In the earth's cells,
whole pastures of light are waiting to be born.

*

Let's be playful, then.
It may be the only way to mend the soul.
A woman stitched it by moonlight
from the sorrows of passion and dew.

*

Let's call down the black and white angels of the air.
It may be the only hope we have.
Wings keep turning the pages of the invisible book
that we write but never know.


(Copyright Allan Cooper, 2007)