For National Poetry Month, I’m sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day.

Today’s poem from me is about my lifelong love of books. This poem is best read in desktop or landscape on mobile on your browser of choice to preserve the line breaks as I intended them.

The Fountainhead

--- after smelling a dusty copy of a John McPhee book I picked up at the library for 50 cents

1.

I was biking down
the Marsh Creek Road
that day when I spied it,
lying there, cover ripped off,
inviting me to stop
and pick it up.
Inside its pages was 
a story of
the architectural superiority
of man, how he had built
skyscrapers to show
his greatness.
I stooped down and 
learned to what heights
men could climb.
Later reading Jon Krakauer,
I learned of men
who failed to attain such 
heights alive,
but for now, 
with one bare knee in the dirt,
as I read her philosophical objectivism,
I chose not think of how
from dust I had come,
to dust I would return.
I let my thoughts soar higher.

2. 

Or inside its pages was 
a song not of myself, but of America
free,  
	        of Texas gaining its independence,
of Alaska and Hawaii, 
and even farther out
				   	            space, the final frontier
     of California 
and its Valley of the Dolls.
     We thumb through the lurid details of the lives 
of others, celebrities like
they were going out of fashion, lurid details
     that is, but they're not,
they are so chic, so in
the moment, so...so....
("a man breathes deep into his saxophone")
American.

3. 

From a satellite, I see that boy kneeling
beside the back road, wish
I could be like him.
I need to be like him, 
in love with the printed word,
(like my neighbor John,
who has to print out
articles from the Internet he wants to read
-- he has to touch them, feel their weight, 
their heft 
to make it a corporeal
presence 
like ink smudging on your fingers
after reading a newspaper)
not the digitized code
a poem like this breaks down into eons later.

Today’s poem from one of three sites that share a poem each day is “Papyrus Pantoum” by Arthur Size from Poetry Daily.