Out of Focus

This morning...
slightly out of focus...
sub-consciously...
dwells on you.

There are a set of books on the shelf that are familiar to me only by the way they feel in my fingers. I've forgotten their titles, the authors. But I need to rummage through them now and then, for reassurance. They're a kind of assurance that the world is still sane and that I'm still me.

I squint from where I lay in my bed, trying to figure what books stand stretched on the shelf in the hall...I'm trying to recall their titles. The one that comes to my mind in the thickness of its pages, the different fonts, the foreword, the dogears, it's slightly weak spine and the lines formed on the front with age, is Rainer Maria Rilke's collection.

It transports me to that afternoon's warmth, the buzz in the cafe, the way I couldn't wait to start reading Rilke, even as I also knew the book was your parting gift to me.