Library

Paulatim lachrymas rerum experentia tersit.
Petrarch

Father’s books lying on the living-room floor

Must be divided into threes: art history,

Classical letters and, left from my days here,

Unsteady stacks of quasi-educational lore

That show yellowing Geographic scientists

Perennially lost in rain forest mists.

An instant choice will cull some from the rest

So they may become mine—a banausic test.

Prewar light glimmers in the apartment:

A shadowplay that summons an adolescence

Of slammed doors and risible nothings

Hurled at retreating parental backs

—The most telling blows always sotto voce—

As I stormed and wept and read in silence.

Now, standing again in silence, I stare

At a word trove given two sons to share.

Some are dated in the first blank page: 1

January 1938 this reads, as if a resolution

Made (and kept?); this ruddy leather edition

States simply Property of—with no name given.

I gesture toward the emptiness of gifts

Prematurely bestowed in illness’s ruin

And blow dust off an enfeebled spine,

Filling lungs with belletristic grime.

It’s all some forgotten chore from a childhood

The hall mirror charitably declares was good.

Pictures of other libraries fill my head:

Weighty tomes I hauled to girlfriends’ walkups,

Barely unpacked before again in boxes;

Or Sophoclean dramas, lost to ancient fires,

Which exist in name only; or that fable

Of an infinitely circular Library of Babel

Borges saw as self-referential: nooks,

Corridors, dead ends, twisting stairwells:

Bibliographic cargo cults and infidels.

In his bed, dreaming of a golden age of looks

And cars, booze and fine clothes, my father snores

And chokes and comes to. . . . Sunlight pours

Into empty bookcases. Where in hell are they?!

If memory then corrects, questions stay

And, refracting off walls, gather numb force

As I read a volume plucked at random

Only to start up when hoarse ripples burn

My innermost ear: Where, where, where?

Soon my father will awaken to find no air.

One tattered cover shows a boy’s ray-gun

Pointed to the sun: the future, that much is clear.

Somewhere where this library can cohere.

Nearly finished, I stumble on Petrarch’s Epistles

And, apropos of age, find: In that passing, I shall

Not seem myself: another brow, other habits, a new form

Of the mind, another voice sounding. . . . Father whistles

Down the hallways for his lackadaisical firstborn.

Little by little, experience wipes dry our tears.

The job’s done—leaving me to calculate the years

I withheld my love, and the years I’ve left to mourn.

Source: The King’s Question (Graywolf Press, 2008)