The seagreen due-date slip slithers from
my pile of papers and unread books.
When do we find ourselves, and where?
DO NOT REMOVE THIS CARD
It must hail from the books I stole
in the bloody days of Saigon and Jackson State.
We work to separate dread from dread.
In life, of life, joy from perilous joy.
TEN CENTS CHARGED IF LOST
Books mark us for good but don’t always help.
Facts, moments, cravings, and loss
storm our days. The aimless slip overlies
the films that played the long-gone Surf,
far out the Avenues, farther out the Sunset
than my library. In row eight, next to me,
Mifune sulks and grunts. Outside, the fog
straps street lamps and the Surf’s marquee.
But what book was it? What did it do to me?
I must have broken its spine there,
underlined what seemed momentous then.
Books replaced childhood’s confessionals,
our shuttered, whispery theatres of sin.
Nostalgia sickens but delivers us.
We want to be sick, delivered from
the moment, our only real home. I stole
to keep books close, like Hardy’s poems,
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.
Be keen. Beware unwanted visitors.
Remembrance takes fools hostage. Keep close
what mystifies and justifies.
I still desire stolen secrecies
and am hostage to what maybe never was.
Reveries and revenants. A memory,
this memory, burns the moment, this time
of mine that doesn’t belong to me but is me.
The rapturous due date’s long overdue.
