But at the end of the day, I can't bear to be without a significant dictionary between hard covers. My Websters has always doubled as a great flower presser for my daughter. Nor can I forego David Shipman's "The Story of Cinema," Peter Ackroyd's biography of T.S. Eliot, or my plastic-film-covered copy of Godel Escher Bach that both you and I know I will never actually read unless I am one day bedridden for 6 months with a mysterious ailment that allows only for eye movement.
While packing my books, it came to my attention that I had a ridiculous number of slender poetry volumes. Many of these were amassed in the 1980s and 90s in Dublin when the rise of small presses allowed young, urban poets to get their voices heard by the poetry-loving Irish public. Recently I heard from an Irish woman now living in Canada who had bought my early books and told me how she read them with her husband and continued to enjoy them over the years.
It struck me how I have done the same with my favorite volumes: carried them with me on planes, to the beach, to dentist waiting rooms. My Dylan Thomas Collected Poems has completely fallen apart from use. My Complete Shakespeare was once run over by a bus. Duct tape came to the rescue. It's an odd thought that someone else might have one of my collections in their bag while they wait for the train or sit at the boarding gate. My books have emigrated with people, traveled to places I have never been, made ripples in the lives of strangers I will never know about. Right on, slender volumes!
Ok, back to packing. But first, a recent poem from my trip to Taos, New Mexico.
New Mexico Sixty Eight
On the road to Santa Fe from Taos
the sky went slowly wild with dawn pinks
and blues, I felt loose in my life, rattled.
Orange rain in the far South,
the Rio Grande riding by on its own time
with its own secret set of expectations.
Some nights before, we had driven out
beyond the last of the mobile homes
to the end of the road; the Milky Way
wrapped her cool scarf round the moon’s throat,
coyotes yipped and yowled
and the mesa dogs joined them.
I stood by the car, cold, a little jarred,
and I wished someone would hug me
but nobody did. I’m glad.
Every evening after that we headed
to the Guadalajara Bar and Grill
and in the parking lot among the flatbed trucks
we watched the sky unfold and unfold
and unfold, and it felt good
to know just why I was afraid;
that sometimes it takes driving out
to where there’s no more road,
to listen to the dark, and pick apart
the winking plane lights from the satellites,
hum a lullaby if humming is all you can come by
and let it burn away, the surface layer
the jewelry, till you are down to something
more raw, more elemental, to where fear
lies quietly side by side with sadness
anger, joy, whatever else you need in life
just to get by, to get you on that road to Santa Fe
and the airport and the plane and the home alone.
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