From Word To Word

The poem that I posted most recently was actually written several years ago, but it expresses an emotion that I have been feeling very strongly over this Christmas season, an emotion that I usually describe as a desire for the text.  It is for me, at its strongest, a consuming eroticism, a need, not just to read and to write, but to somehow devour the text, to ravish it, or perhaps, to make myself more properly the object of this encounter, it is a desire to be myself devoured and ravished by the text.  It is a desire for more than the physical text itself, for more than what this text might mean, for more even than the act of reading, but for something beyond these things that I do not quite understand.

I have been feeling this desire so strongly over the past month or more because I have been too occupied to satisfy it, even if my occupations were enjoyable.  I have been doing my holiday baking, and I have been cooking for the various family gatherings, and I have been making toys as Christmas presents for my sons, all things I love to do, and yet they have come at the cost of time for any serious writing and for any reading at all.  I want nothing more, at this moment, than a week of solitude, just to read.  I want to be drowned in reading.  I want to be buried in it.  I want to be entombed in it.  This is my desire for the text.