Fragments by Kim Stafford

Secret book, forgotten book, book loaned often, never
returned but passing on to banker, beggar, lover,
babe in arms, mother’s solitary finger and thumb.

Thin book read many times. Thick tome as doorstop, flower
press, battered booster for a child until the morning we need
exactly what it holds and fan the pages to that place and read aloud.

The Gideon’s bible in the motel drawer . . . someone decided no one should have to pass the night alone without at least one book.

A phone call out of the blue: “Hey, are you Kim? I’m a lawyer in
New York. I just want you to know I called in sick today, bought
your book at The Strand bookstore, read all afternoon in
Union Square, and then called the firm and quit my job!”

We watch our boy first open a book . . . close it . . . open it . . .
go forward . . . go backward . . . Now his life can happen in two directions. Time has a hinge. Good luck is waiting for him.

Window for light, chair for rest, book for the art of disappearing.

My beloved wears a headlamp, reading in bed.
At 3 a.m. the shadow of her page crosses the ceiling,
as she burrows into the book.

If you read one chapter before first light, and the next chapter
after evening has passed, does the book speak in a different voice?

Slowing, slowing . . . the last few pages of a
certain book . . . reluctance to end this life.

After completing a novel, Alice Walker sat on her porch
in the evening, mourning the days and days ahead when her life
would no longer be haunted by this strange essential kinship
of characters who had been sleeping in her bed, rising
at first light beside her, sitting silent across the table for years.

Driving east from Portland, I picked up a hitchhiker with a
shopping bag filled with books from the public library. His life,
he said, was to live on the mountain in a tent alone, and read.
Every two weeks he went to town for more books.

“And what do you do?” he said.

“I’m a writer.”

“A writer! Hey, brother, I’m a reader! We need each other!”

He asked to get out high on a ridge at
a bend in the road-scruffy, happy, free.

There is only one book in the house, and it was written about
the people of the house, and given to the people of the house.

“Beloved, let’s take a summer journey on
small roads of long books read aloud.”

In the attic of the old house she found a book signed to a lady
by Samuel Clemens: “Be good, and you will be lonely.”

Listen, how the wind is rising—it has a far place to be.
So does a book’s voice travel through time.

One way to be a writer: slip your poems secretly into
your favorite books in the library, so your kind of person
will find them, understand you, never meet, but know.

Take up your favorite book. Where will you go to read it?
Charlotte’s Web in the barn? Walden under an autumn maple?
How will the reading be different in that place?

I asked an elder of the Klamath tribe,
“What do you want for your people in your lifetime?”

“I want a book about the Klamath people
written by the Klamath people.”

Question by a girl in the fifth grade: “Do the worlds
that happen inside books keep happening when you close them?”

The medieval monastic rule specifies: “No brother shall read while others are trying to sleep.” They had not yet invented silent reading.

To meet the bookbinder’s deadline, I stayed up all night folding the printed sheets . . . felt my hands had been dipped in cream, turning the limp sheets of the French mould-made paper “Rives light” . . . the bone folder creasing to a crisp line . . . the night of three thousand folds.

In the hospital, my aunt, in uncertain condition, tells me with verve: “I’m so glad my mind is stocked with the treasures of literature!”

I stole a book from church because it fit
my hand so well-little testament at age 7.

In the Middle Ages, people could not often afford books—
so they borrowed them one at a time, and committed
them to memory. On a journey, one would recite for
traveling friends the long rhythmic story carried in mind.

What happens to your heart when you
open a book and close the world of worry?

Inside the house, the book sends you to a moment far
across the prairie. Outside, walking over open ground,
something you see makes you remember inside the book.

The child tells how to write a story: “Just describe
what your life would be like if you were another person.”

A writer works to mine silence.

My friend in eastern Poland says, “After you read a book
that moves you, you should do something.” After reading
Hesse’s Journey to the East, he found a Gypsy cart, and took
a slow journey to the east. Never returned to the city of Warsaw.

One can say, “I wonder.” In German, one can say
“It wonders me . . .” (Es wundert mich). A good book wonders me.

A stack of books-geologic strata of your pleasures.

Scent, clear light, a story begins to pull you in.

Reading late, you are a salmon going home—
driving upriver page by page to the source.

You begin reading slower, lingering, close the book
and look far away . . . do not let this story end.

The old quilt made of family clothes . . . the quilt-maker says,
“It scares me-what this quilt knows about me.
So with a book that knows you well.

My father told about a place you could hide where the eave
overhung a ledge above the garage. That place, and books, he said,
was the summer place of his childhood. A little infinity of pleasure.

In the library, you walk the stacks, hoping a book is waiting
to ambush you, alter your plans, take over. There it is!

Out of the crowd stepped a beautiful woman with graying hair.
“Do you remember me?” she says. “I was in your high school class.
I have read your book. I felt it spoke directly to me.”
She turns away, and disappears into the crowd.

The friendly, quiet scent of a British novel bound in the last century.

A long, lingering rain on the window drives you deeper into the story.

Strangers ask where you are from. Books ask where are you to—
where are you going now that you have been changed?

“I’ll be there pretty soon. I have to finish this chapter . . .
oh, about thirty pages, okay?”

After class at the penitentiary, a prisoner stole my copy of
Piers Plowman. I imagine his night in the cell with his plunder,
opening the little book to read:
In a somer seson whanne softe waes the sonne /
I shope me in shroudes, a shepe as I were; /
went wyde in this worlde, wondres to here . . . .

After lightning hit the roof of the potter’s shop, sprung a leak
in the attic water heater, flooded the studio, and soaked
the biography of the poet, the potter gave me the book as a gift.
Then many winter nights of I fanned the pages in front of the fire—
a thick book touched by the storm about the stormy life of the bard.

The cosmonaut smuggled Pushkin into the
rocket capsule just before take-off. Survival.

She turned from the book with a sentence in mind that held
the key to her life: “I will obey the spirit of your desire,
but not the letter of your command.”

I never met her, but I’ve met the characters in her book.

Writing: Setting the beehive among flowers. Reading: sipping honey.

A book is medical in the spiritual sense: Reading
does not cancel pain, but settles the mind to face it.

Emerson advised never to read a whole book, but only to
consume those parts that speak directly to you. Like a deer
in the meadow, he said, you select the most succulent
buds of the grass. You browse.

Is it more important that this is summer or the 21st century?
Read the book that takes you away from here to now.

A book can be a nutritious souvenir from a bitter time.

The rain will say anything you want to hear. The book has a message for you alone. Others will read the same words, but miss the secret.

What a fate for a writer: my mother was reading
Kipling’s Kim in the hospital, and named me for the book.

The writer saw an old man in a café reading the book she
had written—and was ashamed: I could have written better,
deeper, to save him. But then he smiled, and looked far away.

In the library, haunting the stacks, on an uncertain mission,
browsing like a hungry animal, you watch your hand reach
for one book, not any other. Why?

The designer’s hunch: If you do not finish reading a book,
it is not the writer who failed you, but the page designer.
You grow tired on this journey.

Life cycle of an idea: pen . . . paper . . . tears . . . laughter . . . manuscript . . . bound book . . . little bookstore . . . gift . . .
a reader’s pillow on a delicious rainy day . . . pen . . . paper . . . .

Many among us prophesied the demise of the book. “We will do our reading on the screen.” Years later, a savvy book publisher began turning websites into books—and sales took off.

In that moment of crisis and illumination, does your life flash
before you in a bright parade-or all the books you have not read?

There is a book called The Lost Literature of Medieval England,
a record of manuscripts known but lost. Most were swept away
when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. Hundreds
of titles, a library that will never be.

The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges became director
of the Biblioteca Nationál after he had become blind. In the
great library, he walked slowly along the aisles of books he could
no longer read, sensing their murmurings. Then he learned
the director before him had also been blind, and also the one
before. At this point, you realize you have entered a story
composed by Borges.

The most important book is the unwritten summer in your life.

“I am returning a book I borrowed from your father in 1957.
It’s too late to thank him. Thank you.”