Steals

"Let's go--much as that dog goes,

intently haphazard. The

Mexican light on a day that

"smells like autumn in Connecticut"

makes iris ripples on his

black gleaming fur--and that too

is as one would desire--a radiance

consorting with the dance.

Under his feet

rocks and mud, his imagination, sniffing,

engaged in its perceptions--dancing

edgeways, there's nothing

the dog disdains on his way,

nevertheless he

keeps moving, changing

pace and approach but

not direction--"every step an arrival."

-- Denise Levertov, "Overland to the Islands," the first poem in Man in the Poetic Mode, published 1970, ed. Joy Zweigler

--

I love being surprised by book sales. Buy a bag for $4, $1, whatever the rate; shuffle through narrow aisles between picnic tables covered with obscurity stacks; avoid smelly and bearded book lover, huddled over his plunder of Civil War novels; observe the whippet woman in the maroon scarf, smell her churchy perfume coming from oily, wrinkly, clammy fingers wrapped in rings as she reaches for a Danielle Steele she somehow hasn't read; scan spines, titles printed in 1970s serif fonts of boldness and contrast stomping four-word economic arguments, catchphrases of days lost in reams and storehouses of media and dust, the days when journalists did their jobs well whether they were rich or poor, old or young, and when historians knew reacting to Thucydides wasn't a vain effort; flip elderly pages of black-and-white photographs of paragons and damsels doing what they did, eating and pointing fingers and struggling with grime; discover the faded green bookmark a ghost placed there between anonymous pages for reasons now unknowable; fill your bought bag with heaviness that appeals to you; feel the arm strength of a thief who uncovers a cache and must move it now; increase your plunder even as the bag splits in protest and cover corners peek through the breaches like curious kids watching rioters from a balcony;--again, I tell you, I love book sales.

That happened this morning.

--

My cache (in no order):

The Play and the Reader, by Johnson, Bierman & Hart

Theatre: A Way of Seeing, by M. S. Baranger

The New York Public Library: Performing Arts Desk Reference

Storyteller, by Ramon Royal Ross

American Words, by Mitford M. Mathews

News is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century, by Pete Hamill

Beowulf: A New Prose Translation, by E. Talbot Donaldson

Guide to English Literature: From Beowulf through Chaucer and Medieval Drama, by David M. Zesmer

This Is Pop: In Search of the Elusive of Experience Music Project, ed. by Eric Weisbard

The Best of Christian Writing 2000, ed. by John Wilson

Four Ways of Being Human, by Gene Lisitzky

Man in the Poetic Mode, ed. by Joy Zweigler

J. B., by Archibald MacLeish

Great Myths of Economics, by Don Paarlberg

On the Other Side of Tomorrow, by Harold Rogers

Buoyant Billions, Farfetched Fables, & Shakes Versus Shav, by Bernard Shaw

Circling Back, by Gary. H. Holthaus

Children's Plays for Creative Actors, by Claire Boiko

Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones

--

And all that, folks, for $4 in a bag.