I can get pretty excited about the feel of paper, the smell of the page, embossed bindings, although lately I find the dusty scents more in wine tannins than books.

I can also get pretty excited about an iPhone app that means thousands of poems that only weigh 135 grams to pack around. I especially love the spinner that combines a top theme, say Insecurity with a second theme, say, Religion.

It turned up poets I don’t already know.

Equations of the Light
By Dana Gioia
Turning the corner, we discovered it
just as the old wrought-iron lamps went on—
a quiet, tree-lined street, only one block long
resting between the noisy avenues.

The streetlamps splashed the shadows of the leaves
across the whitewashed brick, and each tall window
glowing through the ivy-decked facade
promised lives as perfect as the light.

Walking beneath the trees, we counted all
the high black doors of houses bolted shut.
And yet we could have opened any door,
entered any room the evening offered.

Or were we deluded by the strange
equations of the light, the vagrant wind
searching the trees, that we believed this brief
conjunction of our separate lives was real?

It seemed that moment lingered like a ghost,
a flicker in the air, smaller than a moth,
a curl of smoke flaring from a match,
haunting a world it could not touch or hear.

There should have been a greeting or a sign,
the smile of a stranger, something beyond
the soft refusals of the summer air
and children trading secrets on the steps.

Traffic bellowed from the avenue.
Our shadows moved across the street’s long wall,
and at the end what else could I have done
but turn the corner back into my life?

I guess this is an After poem then, located on the iPhone, read on the Max, and its delicate questioning destroyed as I walked into the classroom to train Drupal. The training was great, though, so yeah, what else could I do?

It bounces into before, to The Unbearable Lightness of Being (book and movie), the moment when Thomas says, “We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

___

I ran across this quote today: During the past five years, I’ve learned that time flies faster than you think, and because you only live once, you have to learn from your mistakes, live your dreams and be accountable.” Made me think of  the above, and appreciate the honesty of not being able to know.