Reading Lamp

• by
• Brian Culhane

Tonight, to escape the din of news,
I turn on a gooseneck reading lamp.
At once, a warm yellow light is cast
Onto my newly bought womb chair.
 
I reach for a book and nestle down
In a chair that Florence Knoll once
Requested Eero Saarinen design 
To be “like a basket full of pillows.”
 
But no position can ease my mind,
Filled with wars, idiocy, desperation.
Novel, play, poem—what good
Can come even from favorite books?
 
To the philosopher J. L. Austin,
Nothing fictional ever mattered;
Only “performative utterances”
Signified, as words turned actions:
 
“I resign”—employment, or chess;
“I do”—a marriage ceremony;
“The court is now in session”;
“I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow”;
 
These in How to Do Things with Words,
Which I randomly chose to open.
True, if I sit down to write, I expect
Not much really to happen beyond
 
Some reader, somewhere, perhaps,
Finding aesthetic value, an aha!
Or, if I’m lucky, the consolation
Of clarity’s glimmering moments.
 
Yet then I recall Mill, hope lost,
Discerned in Wordsworth a beauty
That found him, clasped him, held him—
Lyrics that wrought lasting change,
 
Returning youth to a joy forgotten.
Isn’t that doing things with words?
Shouldn’t a philosophy of language
Grant even a womb chair might bear
 
The weightiest of burdens, or that
As night deepens, a gooseneck lamp,
Gathering rays out of thinnest air,
Brighten far beyond pages’ fold?
 
What spirit, summoned, may wake us
To wonder with a whisper? What voice
May someday save us from the cold,
When the world is too much with us?