I always take a book along,
raising it between my eyes and
whatever landscape I’ve come
so far to see – blue mountains,
or vineyards with their musky
purpling grapes; often a bay
or ocean unfolding just as far
as the horizon of the book
whose pages turn like surf
beneath my fingertips.
Perhaps I could simply stay at home
and have some cardboard scenery
shuffled at intervals. The story
I inhabit would be the same: a mystery
or poem, the memoir of some other
traveller in some other
more indelible century.
But sometimes in early morning,
or at scented dusk, what I see
and read converge
into a kind of symmetry,
a blending of sight and syllable,
a language as new to me
as the most tropical landscape.
So that when night finally falls
and I lie in the strange dark,
the rustling I think I hear could be
leaves, or wings, or pages turning,
and on the winding road to sleep
I could be anywhere.
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