On Accepting an Invitation to Read.(Poem)

 
ON ACCEPTING AN INVITATION TO READ 
 
   I love to hear the words at work 
   and savoured in the mouth, 
   these borrowed consonants and vowels, 
   the ones that I have turned and burnished 
   and set into their forms. 
   I like the small attack of nerves, 
   the wetness in the armpit. 
   Microphones do not distress me, 
   the overtones all thinned away, 
   the centre reinforced. 
   That banging in the cafe kitchen, 
   those susurrations of the traffic 
   combine to tell us what survives, 
   that poetry is part of it, 
   not more or less important than ... 
   though adding to it even so, 
   restoring what we've not yet seen, 
   bringing ...