As You Read This

by Brett Rutherford

You think you are alone.

I watch your hands

flash white

at turn of page,

follow your eyes

from line to line.

Hands do not blush,

the reading eye

cannot avert,

the mind

does not suspect

my omnipresence.

Counting the beat

your fingers trace

these lines.

You even whisper them

as though my ear

were intimate.

You never suspect

I dream of you,

touch back

your outreached consciousness.

Concealed amid typography,

sighing in each caesura,

intake of breath at every comma,

I am a boy in the shrubbery,

lover in moonlit garden,

a bare toe jutting

     amid the footnotes.

Though you be shy,

doe-wary and skittish,

I stalk this poem,
alert between letters.

Watch all you will

for hawk and hunter,

I am in and on the river

of word-flow.

Casting my net

   mid-ship between stanzas

I hope to catch you.

Op. 896, from 2017 noteboook