Too gentle for such untamed words,
these pastel birds painted
by old Professor Lee’s sister.
A traditional Chinese art, he said,
when he met me at the Beijing train station
and, along with the bookmarks
and a skewer of crabapples
covered with crackly caramel,
presented me with a copy of his
1935 Harvard thesis on Coleridge.

Nor this multi-colored jagged jigsaw
of construction paper
pasted onto thin cardboard
roughly cut with dull scissors,
made for me in craft class
by my mother in her last, lost, fragile years.
They forced me to do this, she said,
it’s nothing I invented.
But she had saved it until I came
and so I keep it with the others
in the hexagonal Japanese paper box,
waiting for, someday, perhaps,
my last book.

In the end I go with no bookmark at all
for this Sappho, yellowed from the sun,
watermarked from seaside reading.
Blades of grass, strands of hair,
a thin curved flake from my cat’s claw
would suit these pages more than any other,
but the poems are as fragmented as my reading,
and so in the end I leave the book on my windowsill
where the bibliomancing wind can get at it,
ruffle the pages like an Aeolian harp,
and leave it for me to figure out which shards of ancient Greece
fit smoothly into my interior fragmented spaces.