I stole a book

I stole a book from my jr. high library. A book called The Silver Swan, Poems of romance and mystery. Of course that is what I would have stolen in jr. high. Of course. Poems of romance and mystery.

I still have it and I opened it this morning. I couldn't tell you if the marked pages were marked by me or someone before me. Some good soul who returned the book... But here is a poem whose page was bent down, someone wanted to remember it. It could have been me, it could have.

A World To Do
for Jeffrey

"I busy too," the little boy
said, lost in his book
about a little boy, lost
in his book, with nothing


but a purple crayon
and his wits to get him out.
"Nobody can sit with me,
I have no room.

I busy
too. So don't do any noise.
We don't want any noise
right now."

He thumbs
through once, thumbs twice;
the pictures, mixed with windy
sighs, grow dizzy,

world
as difficult, high drifting
as the two-day snow that can
not stop.

How will the bushes,
sinking deeper and deeper,
trees and birds, wrapt
up, ever hop
out again?

Any minute now the blizzard,
scared and wild, the animals
lost in it--O the fur,

the red-eyed claws, crying
for their home--may burst
into the room. Try words
he's almost learned

on them?
He sighs, "I need a man here;
I can't do all this work
alone."

Still winter, flock
of pages bent on reading
their own argument, continues
thumbing through itself.

-Theodore Weiss