Amy Watkins: What I Love About Fiction

Turning each page, how fast
they pile up in your left hand,
how your progress is marked
by a bookmark’s steady march
through leaves. 
And poetry, the opposite:
how slowly you move from poem
to poem, how long it takes

to read one slender volume,
how each night you turn only one
or two pages, carefully,
and then sleep,
like learning to love a skinny
and complicated girl.