The Perfect Book
The world outside the
books
was not a happy one,
Maggie felt
‘The Mill on
the Floss’
It will always lurk in late night shadows
or in the margin of a life mis-spent,
an ambition not to be realized,
to write that novel that I’ll never write.
It wouldn’t have to be the perfect book
to lie quite disregarded in a drawer,
not packed with scintillating episodes
or days of shimmering unhappiness.
It only has to be what it would be.
But gradually the stilted prose and plot,
as transparent as children’s lies, would grow
in stature like the prowess of the friend
of a friend genius that everyone’s
heard about but no-one’s met. Invested
with all such panache imagined for it,
its momentum soon like an avalanche
in spring, its reputation guaranteed
by those who haven’t read a word of it,
who picture their own novel for themselves.
It is about the maverick who finds
love insufficient for his purposes,
or, set in 1800’s provinces,
the chronic want of kitchen maids that glanced
sideways at ostler’s boys while inside them
passionate thoughts kept them so abstract at
their work, or only stories they’d wanted
to be characters in, once chanced upon
in library books or handed down in school
from teachers with tobacco habits dressed
in tweed. It may or may not start to rain
outside and the clock on the mantelpiece
stopped in an early chapter yesterday
or the day before. There, before the plot
thickened, before the crime, crisis or kiss
that caused the tragicomedy, sunlight
is still as radiant as it was then.