The Book Mark

This has happened to me
several times now: I’m reading
a book from the library, and when
I turn the page, something falls
into my lap. Once, a take-out receipt
for Chinese, $14.85 for dumplings,
spare ribs, and Lo mein; once a flower,
purple, a pansy pressed so thin I could
nearly see the world in violet; twice,
prayer cards: a photo of crutches
and prosthetic ex-votos for St. Roche
of New Orleans, and today, out of the guts
of a volume of American Poetry, a card
for Eileen, white with the image of a candle:

May this candle be a light
for you, Lord, to enlighten me
in my difficulties and decisions.
I place in your care those I come
to pray for, especially [Eileen].

I picture the high windowed,
shadowy church where the flickering
candles watched in their terraced rows,
how the reader stood and wrote
and lit and prayed, and how they left
and went home then to the book.
What page had they marked?
Was it Dickinson’s quatrains?
Roethke’s villanelle? I’d let the book
fall closed without thinking
and should have thought
of the hand that tucked the card
between the pages – the gesture
of someone who’d made a plan
to come back, knowing the places
to which one must return and those
who one must remember.

Daniel Johnson is a writer from New Jersey living in Burlington, Vermont. He’s a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at University College Cork. His work has appeared in journals such as Southword, Reed Magazine, and the Honest Ulsterman. He’s on social media @djohnsonwrites.