~JANET MCCANN~

THE BOOKSTORE ON BROADWAY, IN ALBANY: AWP CONFERENCE 1999

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In the window, children's hardbacks
from the seventies, foxed spines,
ripped covers.  Out front a rack
of faded fly-specked rain-spotted paperbacks.

It's almost dark in there, I make my way
among the racks and racks of crumbling
paperbacks, magazines, the precarious stacks
of books and music.  Mouse dirt.  Ants.

Dust over everything.  At first the room
looks empty but then I spot an ancient
Irishman slumped on a rusty metal chair.
I find a Nero Wolfe for 35 cents

and give him two quarters.  Once back
at the hotel, I stop to think,
maybe I missed a first edition Poe, or
a Leaves of Grass in there!  So I return,

but the place is all closed up, a big
black padlock on the door.  And I am glad,
for the long dark room was balanced at the point
between holding separate books and only dust

that would drift out through the city
in a sullen cloud, and finally disperse
to a tepid papery smell over Albany.
I should have known, passing over tinny quarters,

that our commerce took place there at the very edge,
that it was nightfall, that we were poised
between coherence and chaos,
between history and annihilation.
 
 

© by Janet McCann