Bookmarks and Headstones
My shelves lift volumes covered soft and hard,
a thousand books I’ve given brief regard.
Slower gazing reveals the multitude
all clasping slender markers that protrude
like flowers lazing where the reading paused
and then expired when the flow was lost.
Like them my body is a flower clasped
between the fast-read chapters of my past
and all my future pages still untold.
After each day’s loud narration, my soul
retreats to some hidden library room
while body marks where story should resume.
The vast hillside lawn has horizontal
shelves of tightly shouldered bookmarks, some tall
some short, but all denoting interrupt-
ted narratives of people who have upped
and stuck a headstone where life was leading,
and where visitors may resume reading.
John K. Kruschke has poems published or accepted in Blue Unicorn, Smoky Blue Literary & Arts Magazine, Stickman Review, Flying Island Literary Journal, Discretionary Love, The Tipton Poetry Journal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Pine Hills Review, and Sage Magazine (x 4), along with 25 quatrains as chapter epigraphs. He has also published numerous articles in scientific journals on topics ranging across moral psychology, learning theory, and Bayesian statistics. He is Provost Professor Emeritus at Indiana University in Bloomington. johnkruschke.com/poems.html
Grand Little Things 