The Book

Miller Williams

I held it in my hands while he told me the story.

He had found it in a fallen bunker,
a book for notes with the pages blank.
He took it to keep for a sketchbook and diary.

He learned years later, when he showed the book
to an old bookbinder, who paled, and stepped back
a long step and told him what he held,
what he had laid the days of his life in.
It's bound, the binder said, in human skin.

I stood turning it over in my hands,
turning it in my head. Human skin.

What child did this skin fit? What man, what

woman?

Dragged still full of its flesh from what dream?

Who took it off the meat? Some other one

who stayed alive by knowing how to do this?

I stared at the changing book and a horror grew,

I stared and a horror grew, which was, which is,

how beautiful it was until I knew.

     The structure of the poem is as if a story is being told.  In lines one through four, he starts out by explaining how they got the book.  Although he never specifies who "he" is, I automatically assumed it was his grandfather because they are best known for telling stories.  In the third stanza, he goes on to tell the disturbing truth about the book.  I found the structure of the next three stanzas was interesting.  They are all different thoughts of his about the book.  When I read this, it helped me see the thought process he was going through.  These stanzas also show the innocence of him, as if he was a child when this happened.  The last stanza was a loss of innocence for him.  He realized that something so great could turn out to be something horrible.  I also took from the last stanza that knowledge isn't always enlightening, and can be destructive to ourselves.