Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

The Book That Changed My Life  
Alex Lemon

As a first-grader, I strained, red-faced, to lift it. Long as my legs, when opened, its glossy pages stretched my entire little boy wingspan. Every page was brilliant with colors—ocean fish, anemones, and coral. Staring into The Underwater World of Jacques Cousteau tightened my chest, made my heart race. Bustling neon, a school of fish layer across the silver-blue: in the next they dart into a reef. Umbrella-faced fish colored like tigers, like puddles reflecting the midway’s staggering lights.

Each scene was so wildly foreign to me that the book never got old; it was bottomless. Each day, I spent hours in my room, laying on a cowhide rug, gawking at this other world. Curves, curlicues of yellow and turquoise, sweeps, arrows of blue.  And all of it alive.

It’s gemlike in my memory; glowing with a color and shine that fit the wildness in our ramshackle house because my mother had wallpapered with National Geographic maps. Each wall was covered in colored stains and smears. But the book stood out. It smelled like nothing else in our home; the heavy pages smelled expensive, like ritually cleaned stained glass.

The Underwater World arrived, a gift from my mother, and my imagination was instantly stretched. Incredibly, unbelievably, there was so much more than my little boy life of clambering through the caves and rocks of Barn’s Bluff. Outward and beyond, there was no end. The bullheads I’d caught in the Mississippi, mustachioed with barbs that snarled my hands bloody, were nothing compared to what lived in this book. What now lived in my imagination.

But I’m not sure I can stop with The Underwater World. If I did, I’m not sure it would be the truth. I’m can’t say I’m sure of anything right now. 

Today, I learned that I’m going to be a father. It feels as if the thousands of books, the hundreds of thousands of pages that I’ve read before this moment never passed in front of my eyes. I can hardly remember holding them in my hands.

The book that changed my life is the book of stories that will be the life of my unborn child. In the same way that Jacques Cousteau’s worlds opened me to places I didn’t know existed, the book of a child’s, my child, my child that will be a life, a life of stories immensely filled with joy and heartbreak and suffering and kindness, is boundless.

Its first page begins to fill as it opens, an opening I thought might never happen. To a vastness of light, it opens and it is written as it opens and behind my eyes, I feel the weight of everything outside of me. Something is sparking in my chest, a fearful bliss, and my eyes are wet. All day my eyes, my cheeks are wet. It has a similar asking hugeness that The Underwater World had for me when I was 6, but this feels like an ocean of books, a boiling ocean inside my chest. And there’s no way I can carry this inside me, on my back, behind my eyes, this weight down my cheeks. It is opens and is and becomes and grows and is written in an ever-expanding intensity, a bustle and glow. Just a few hours now, and already, The Book that Changed My Life is brimmingly filled. Opened and unwritten and becoming and endless—all of it scribbled with a burst-chest, a blinding amount of love. 

Alex Lemon is the author of Happy: A Memoir (Scribner), the poetry collections Mosquito (Tin House Books), Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed Editions), Fancy Beasts (forthcoming, Milkweed Editions), and the chapbook At Last Unfolding Congo (horse less press). His writing has appeared in Esquire, Best American Poetry 2008, AGNI, BOMB, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Open City, Pleiades and Tin House, among others. He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He co-edits LUNA: A Journal of Poetry and Translation with Ray Gonzalez and frequently writes book reviews. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas and teaches at Texas Christian University.