Evening with long books

                        Each man is a half-open door

                        leading to a room for everyone.

                                       —Tomas Tranströmer

My friends say Tolstoy really got into the heads of his female characters.

They give him credit. They talk dreamily of the books they love,

books so long only two will make a whole course. This seems to me

like making twelve gallons of chili and eating nothing else till it’s gone,

but I smile and listen. My friends are smarter than me and more patient,

surely. I’m the only guy in the house tonight so I get my own room

with a good foam mattress, a bad desk, windows that open on other rooms.

I make up the bed and lie down with Tranströmer’s poems, ten or twenty

lines on a page, fewer words in fifty years than Tolstoy or George Eliot

put down in a decent work week. Every man is a half-open door.

~Jeff Gundy