'Your Heart's Beat an Allusion'

Most of us are closet animists at heart. Motility defines life and everything is moving when our back is turned. I arranged vast armies on the floor in my childhood bedroom. Most were American GIs, c. 1945, supplemented by tanks and one crouching soldier with a flamethrower on his back (I bought him from a kid down the street), but the tactics were Napoleonic. When it was time for dinner and I was absent from the bedroom, I remained confident the fighting raged on without me. When I returned, I noticed subtle movements among the assembled armies. I was not Gen. Patton and I trusted my men to carry on bravely. 

In “The Secret Life of Books” (Corrupted Treasures, 1995), the Australian poet Stephen Edgar stipulates in his poem’s first line that books cannot move but nevertheless pulse with life. They are living things more alive than many humans we know. Consider their impact on dedicated readers. From them we have learned that the sea is snotgreen, beauty is pied and the mind is best cleared of cant. Ambition is vaulting; desperation, quiet; fruitfulness, mellow. If books change the world, they do so incrementally, word by word, one reader at a time, not on the barricades but in a chair. Edgar concludes his poem:

 

“They have you. In the end they have written you,

By the intrusion

Of their account of the world, so when

You come to think, to tell, to do,

You’re caught between

Quotation marks, your heart’s beat an allusion.”