The lady looks up. “Yes?”
“Y’all got poetry books?”
She smiles. “Yes.” She takes off her glasses and hangs them on her shirt.
“Lots.” She steps around the counter. “People bring them in all the time. I’ll show you.”
She’s walking now, briskly. I’m in tow. “Are you looking for a specific title?”
I’m not, and this is by design.
Ambling through the stacks of a used bookstore is part of the fun,
I think, especially when I’m browsing poetry books.
“Not really,” I say, “but I’ll know it when I see it.”
I’ve been buying used poetry books for years.
When I find a good one,
I take it home and either use the pages as art,
ripping them out and modge-podging them to VHS tapes,
and sometimes I put certain pages
under the windshield wipers of people I know
or Cybertrucks just for the fuck of it.
I even been known to frame and matte
the best pages and hang them around my home.
The lady stops and gestures at an aisle of shelves.
“I know what you mean,” she says. “Good luck. Let me know if you need anything else.”
“Thank you.”
I see it almost immediately:
A thin, long, bright-red spine.
I tilt my head to read the title: Picasso Poems.
There’s an inscription in the top-right corner:
It reads simply:
12-25-04
Merry Xmas, Dan!
Love, Dad
I read it again and I see.
I see “Dan” unwrapping Picasso Poems on Christmas.
I see him riffling through it, smiling, and getting up to hug Dad.
I see the satisfaction on Dad’s face—his pride, perhaps—and I imagine
how he might feel seeing me right now, holding his present,
reading the note meant for his son.
And it makes me wonder…
What happened?
Why this book is here, on sale for three dollars and not on a shelf in Dan’s home?
I wonder and it makes me feel such strangeness, s
uch sadness that this intimate message,
once written with love is now amid the clinical stacks
and fluorescent lights of Half Price Books.
But why am I thinking this way?
Is it me? Is it inherent? Am I built to seek out emotion?
Or am I, as a writer, conditioned to think this way?
To see stories everywhere?
To create narratives and scenarios out of near nothingness?
Is this just how writers move through the world?