How Books

In a calm, all sides are lee,
Was how one book put it well.

You can’t find a book like that
But by sheer luck, like a calm

On a fierce salt sea. How books
Float up from the sea floor mud

Where lives are too small to read
But not too brief, not those lives,

Nursed in the dark for an age,
Weaned on faint sips from the seeps

Of fumes small lives use for breath—
Your guess is good as the rest.