THE WOMAN WHO LOVES WORDS
can’t get enough, she pores over the Sunday paper
inhaling book reviews, travel essays, recipes, scientific
articles, the latest news. She leans in when the radio’s
disembodied voice talks about a memoir by a woman
whose mother was a cook. The author is not a cook, but a writer
who creates words for others to devour. In her dining room
books jostle on crowded shelves. By her bedside, magazines
folded open to the latest story by Alice Munro or Thomas McGuane wait.
She’s impatient to read them but wants to hold off, wants the comfort
of knowing they’re there, waiting for her eyes, her mind, her heart
to suck them up, the way she remembers sucking a frothy sweet
root beer float through a fat straw. She loves the way words can
smack her like a cold Santa Monica
put down a book and catch her breath.
Lately she’s fallen in love with her Kindle, a contraption
nondescript as a nun. She can’t believe it contains
such drama, intrigue, pain and loss.
Before going to sleep she has to will herself
not to kiss it. A few weeks ago, she got the Daedalus Catalog
and spent an afternoon reading reviews,
drawing big yellow circles with her highlighter, happy that
somewhere in a warehouse all these books actually exist,
they are real, not just her imagination. Perhaps it is because
her own imagination only comes alive when she’s asleep.
It brings friends from far away, it brings the Pacific Ocean
which is 1500 miles away.
During the day she treats her imagination like a dog,
tells it to sit, stay. It is not allowed to intrude into reality
and annoy her husband. Luckily she has friends.
She can go out to lunch and yak her head off and
listen to their stories about their most frightening trips
or the most beautiful kitchen they ever cooked in.
And lucky for her she teaches writing where obedient students
give birth to stories that make her cry.
Only when she nestles her face into the briny scent
of her husband’s neck or the sugar-cookie smell
of her cat behind its ears, do words curtsey and depart.
Then she hears the beat of her own heart and theirs.
