WITH KAFKA.

[dadio]

Kafka would have liked
the way you said that.

You kept his books on
the shelf next to those

of Burroughs and Joyce.
You like the painting on

the book’s paper cover.
Paperbacks are cheap

and soon worn out,
Thornton used to say.

He liked hard covered
books, first editions if

he could afford. He said
Kafka was too morbid

for you. You need a lighter
read, he said, something

that doesn’t mess with
your female head. You

take down the Kafka and
read again where you read

before, the whole drama
unfolding, the printed words

bringing a different world,
and ghostly by the window

with steady stare, Franz Kafka
in silence just sitting there.

[joel]

You kept his books on
the shelf next to those

of Burroughs and Joyce.

You kept his books by poetry and prose
that those who'd read you nighttime stories had
supposed would bring you better dreams; you chose
to read the words that made you glad—
kept company with ghosts when Galahad
abandoned you for heaven— sounded out
a new vocabulary: yes, you graduated
to a truth that lives with doubt
that truth is knowable. You thought about
the dangerous eclipses of the soul—
the loneliness of which he wrote, the shout
for help that no one hears, the bitter role
of love that loves when joy's an unreached goal.
You kept his books because they're beautiful.

[dadio]

thank you, Joel, for reading & for your excellent poem.