Mother always warned me about the Book-Fairies.
I held them in greater awe than even the Christian
God during the two brief phases in my life
When I lived in fear and trembling of Him.
The first was at the innocent age of five
When I had my tonsils and adenoids out
And was discovered to be seriously myopic.
Then at eleven, less innocent, I stumbled upon
Masturbation and became persuaded
Each instance of the strange, compulsive
Spasms it occasioned was cause for dire
Punishment, perhaps the gruesome deaths
Of my parents when they were out in a car
And I was baby-sitting the younger siblings.
To be said in their favour, the Book-Fairies
Were generally aligned on the side of illicit
Pleasure: reading, the solitary vice which
I thought I had personally devised long before
A surge of fresh hormones enabled the other
Gratification I also presumed, for a while,
To be my very own. But the Book-Fairies
Could nonetheless wreak Furies-like
Vengeance on those who unwisely harm books.
The dogging of ears, defacing the pages, stressing
The binding of books were infractions beyond appeal.
Librarians, past whom it was possible
To slip inadvertently damaged volumes, were
A comparatively forgiving bunch.
Unlike the Book-Fairies, they were
Not privy to the immediate scenes of crime,
Unable to spy through my own eyes to catch
The slightest trespass or trangression.
We could construe this decidedly panoptic
Inner censorship as quintessentially Protestant,
Though it now seems to me that, after suffering
The two aforementioned passing bouts
Of monotheism, like childhood measles or mumps,
I embraced a form of polymorphous animism,
Accepting that some daemons (not all
Of whom were benign) lodge within, that I was
Beholden to all which are properly mine.
Especially the tutelary Book-Fairies.
Admittedly, I did not devise reading
On my lonesome. I was taught to at four
By Granny, Mother’s Mother, a Southern
Iron maiden who was driven by spirits of her own,
Among them the urge to transmit something
Of her own intelligence to the sickly,
Brooding and introspective child I was.
She had been a school marm before marrying.
Then, after my grandfather’s death by street-car
In the Houston Heights (average el. 92 ft.),
She became a secretary on refinery row.
Perhaps it is a false memory, but I recollect
The process of learning to read as having been
Instantaneous, of a single piece.
There are after all only twenty-six letters and,
Despite slander to the contrary, they do
more or less capture the sounds of English.
There did remain the problem of their orientation,
Pointing right as opposed to left, and their order,
Easily permutated, recombined, transposed.
My dyslexia was mild, but affects me to this day.
In any event, the words to be found in books
Were vastly more numerous than those I had
Encountered before or did for many years.
So from early on I had a large reading vocabulary
To which I would resort by default, chronically
Mispronouncing words in common use,
Having read them long before I heard them.
As for the Book-Fairies, to this day when I do
Read a cellulose book I inscribe marginal notes
Only sparingly in soft graphite pencil,
Promising myself to return with an art gum
Eraser, a product whose aroma I relish.
The internet will arrive at its dystopian
Perfection when we attach not only images
And sounds but also smells to a page;
Here, for example, emitting in a molecular
Burst an olfactory simulacrum of crumbled
Art gum, no doubt the votive offering
Preferred by the lares which watch over books.
I suspect many readers would not need
That trigger. Words themselves do the job.