Baudelaire considers you his brother, <br />and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs <br />as if to make sure you have not closed the book, <br />and now I am summoning you up again, <br />attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing <br />in the doorway of these words. <br /> <br />Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study, <br />takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you. <br />Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden, <br />and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree, <br />the day hooded by low clouds. <br /> <br />But now you are here with me, <br />composed in the open field of this page, <br />no room or manicured garden to enclose us, <br />no Zeitgeist marching in the background, <br />no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak. <br /> <br />Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental, <br />unnoticed by the monocled eye of History, <br />you could be the man I held the door for <br />this morning at the bank or post office <br />or the one who wrapped my speckled fish. <br />You could be someone I passed on the street <br />or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car. <br /> <br />The sunlight flashes off your windshield, <br />and when I look up into the small, posted mirror, <br />I watch you diminish—my echo, my twin— <br />and vanish around a curve in this whip <br />of a road we can't help traveling together.<br /><br />William Taylor Collins<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/dear-reader-2/
