​Booklover in a Mango Dress, by Nancee Cline

The New Novel, by Winslow Homer (USA) 1877

​Booklover in a Mango Dress
                
Shy in life, she is intrepid as a reader. She is not troubled 
by foreign words or difficult themes, time travel 
 
or conflicting passions. A seeker of solitude 
far from the madding crowd, a new expression 
 
she has adopted after reading a book from England.
She is wearing sunlight in her hair, and a face full of serenity. 
 
Perhaps the book is Gone with the Wind,
or a Tale of Two Cities.  She might be chasing
 
a white rabbit through Wonderland, 
or rafting down the Mississippi River.
 
Wherever in the world of literature she is, she is content.
Sometimes a stunning sentence will stop her;
 
she must live with it a while before she can read on.
She collects quotations, keeps them in a Chinese
 
lacquered jewelry box: random slips of paper, divine
or witty quotations about books, readers, authors.
 
She has enough bookmarks to count as a collection, 
her favorites: a bright woven strip of cloth from Turkey, 
 
and a fragrant one of sandalwood.
Her memory is an encyclopedia of characters,
 
their generosity and their flaws, recklessness 
and fidelity, the tides and swirls of fate.
 
Does Winslow portray this pale bookworm in muted 
colors? On the contrary! Her hair is a red-gold halo,
 
and the color of her dress, delicious.
Let’s consider a new title for this painting:

Bookworm in Tangerine Marmalade 
Future Poet Dressed in Papaya
Blue-stocking in Marigold
 
Besides the gorgeous colour, there are details
on her dress easily overlooked, a black collar
 
and cuffs, and all those black buttons. 
If this were a mystery they would matter,
 
details that would lead us to the bird named  
Baltimore Oriole—orange and black, precise and tidy.
 
But there is no mystery here, except to the people who believe 
that ‘reading for pleasure’ is a contradiction in terms.
 
She has memorized The Lady of Shallot
in a kind of ecstasy, but recited it to no one,
 
at least not yet. She does not want a Lancelot,
a Heathcliff, or a young Prince Hal.
 
If she falls in love in waking life, it will be 
with a boy who also loves books,
 
and she will read aloud to him in green meadows, 
and in the shade of lemon-scented eucalyptus trees.
 
He too will enjoy the clean green fragrance 
of summer grass and Sweet Alyssum.
 
They will pause to enjoy the interruptions 
of ladybugs and the song of meadowlarks. 
 
They will read books aloud together every day, 
even when they are old,
 
cultivating a sensitivity to enchantment,
and the habit of surrender.

Nancee Cline
 
Nancee Cline is a lifetime lover of the written word. She holds a master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities, with a specialty in literature.  She has tutored and taught most of her life, both in California and Hawaii. Today Cline lives with her husband near Kona on the Big Island (the one with the active volcano).  When not reading or writing, she dances hula, bakes peasant bread, and gardens her half acre of wild green.