Used poets

I make my way up rickety stairs

to the small room marked poetry,

a gabled space I cannot stand

up straight in but have to lean

and bend or crouch on my knees

to read the titled spines. The space

like the old house it hides within

smells musty, each book absorbing

and emitting the smell of its brothers

so that each bears a tattooed aroma

of where it has been. I see Frost

and Whitman, Dickenson and Homer,

Collins and Kooser and Eliot and

Wordsworth and then the one

I wasn’t looking for but found

anyway: Housman. Paperback

originally 50 cents published

in 1968 with a psychedelic cover

perhaps to appeal to psychedelic

students wearing paisley shirts

but it is still A Shropshire Lad

in all its elegiac, ballading,

songful, mournful glory.

This poem is submitted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. To see other poems, please visit their site. The links will be live at 2 pm Central time today,

Related: Words Cut like Jewels at The Master’s Artist.