Seattle Small Books Company
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Seattle Small Books Company
On Ancient Paths
A visitor in that room might notice:
The southwest corner did not have shelves
Which would reach the closet’s corner.
Even so, a broken column of books
Rose from the desk and caught the curious eye.
Some books leaned into each other, while some
Above those were laid over on their sides.
Did the imperfect architect perceive
Was the entablatured tympanum
An old construction? Or did those dead poets’
Voices reach at last a more modern ear?
The owner of the books had little room,
Or, it seems, little time to contemplate
The lack of an ancient areostyle.
He needed more than empty, windy space.
These undusted, layered, almost forgotten
Books occupied the visitor’s puzzled mind.
Imagine the way it was
In apartment VIIa—or was it VIIb?
Yeats to the east, Eliot to the west,
Below, the remains of a moveable feast.
On one end the caryatidinal Beach,
Near a horizontal Pound, just out of reach;
And for rooftop, the conjunctival Joyce,
Ulysses returned with a modern voice,
Unacceptable in unIthical London.
Then the somewhat entastic visitor
Began, for a moment, to complete
An image he had begun:
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