On Being of One Persuasion.

• Author: Wagoner, David
• Position: Poem

Beware of a man with one book.

--old Spanish proverb

He'll tell you he has the answers even before you've begun to imagine questions. He'll say with a sincerity as warm as the cold outside the windows that he knows, and has known all along, the secure places where you should invest whatever you remember, that he alone must be granted the safekeeping of everything you've forgotten, that all others before you have narrowed the pathway and paved it with good intentions, have brushed all errors aside, making a clean sweep of the ground for your foot-soles, that the Golden Door at the end of the lane needs only one shake of your hand to fly open and take you in. He'll show you the binding, the justified margins, the readable characters for the slightly sight-impaired like you. He'll say it's free for the asking and even freer for your not asking. He'll place it gently in your hands and surfer you to hold it and call it your very own for your precious sake, not his, and he'll...