The Lives in Novels
                ... thinking of an action as if it
                were eternally repeated ....
                                —Genevieve Lloyd

        i.

Open the book. It is where time is held.
You read the story, as their lives repeat
where their world opens to another world.

Where their book's pages open to your light,
your eyes look down. It's a familiar story.
See their returning lives which they forgot

imprinted in typography. They hurry
toward their same decisions. Swept in being
themselves again, they feel their seconds carry

their lifetimes forward, all their minutes fleeing
into an unchanged plot you've known before.
You've read the book, and you remember seeing

the lines of syllables advancing over
the page, to colonize a void's white field.
The hours begin, again, to disappear.

        ii.

Their destinies find form, indelible.
Captured in ink, no moment ever passes.
Raskolnikov remains in some swift hell

descending as an ax that never ceases
falling in words. Words scatter down the page
like meaning stilling into fractured pieces.

Emma Bovary haunts her story's cage
of paragraphs, where she breathlessly chases
rewards remote beyond each chapter's age.

Line follows line, where Dorothea traces
the forking paths of choices, as though to find
and mend the world. The alphabets of guesses

combine to sentences, as hours extend
into some chronicle where time is still
rustling through the lives the hours pretend.

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Copyright © 2018 Daniel Corrie All rights reserved
from Human
Iris Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission