At W.S. Merwin's, Going Through His Books
The bookworms have already gone through them,
Making the first pass - if they like a passage,
It disappears.
A kind of anti-reading.
I blow dust and frass out of the tunnels
They’ve bored in books your eyes fell
Upon when you were twenty, thirty -
In London, Majorca, Lacam -
Racine’s plays, Burton’s ‘Anatomy
Of Melancholy,’ the essays of Montaigne.
You left your mark, too -
Faint graphitic check marks next
To the passages that burrowed into you.