by Andy Mitchell
The Book of Blank Pages
“Who is your favorite poet?”
I get that a lot.
Who is my favorite poet, I wonder.
There are so many.
Dylan Thomas was my first.
Just as I was catching the bug
He showed me a butterfly
Rare in beauty, flying out into an open field:
A milkweed, a wanderer, a monarch(!)
Then there was Sylvia Plath
Who stung me and died
In the year of my birth.
Oh, but there are so many.
Whose book would I take with me
To a deserted island? Whose words
Would best sustain me? Who
Is my bread and my wine?
The verse of Edward Hirsch
Never fails to nourish, its humble flight
Seeming ever thankful for its wings.
In fact his special orders account
For this present task, cotton
candy being quicker than liquor.
Oh, but there are so many, mostly dead
And buried like Rossetti’s love
Songs for his wife.
They exhumed them;
Excavated Sappho;
Unearthed Emily’s room.
“…going down and down
For the good turf. Digging…”
I came up with Larkin, Lorca,
Berryman, Baudelaire. But per-
haps I would choose a book by none
Of these. Rowing out toward a mere
Lake isle, with a bottle, and a baguette,
Perhaps I would take a book of blank pages
And record my own fieldwork.
The Book of Blank Pages (short version)
They ask me whose book
I would take
To a deserted island.
I go through the list
Until I’m listless.
There really are so many.
And yet it comes down
To one in the end,
Mine, the one I’d write
If I were stranded there.
