A comfortable chair near the poetry

I stopped off in The Dusty Bookshelf. I found Billy Collins sitting hardbacked on the shelf for $7.95, used. He made me smile at almost nothing as I stood for free – with an occasional tug in the other direction. But I was more in the mood for something – or someone – softer. Not overly animated, but responsive to my pensive looks.

A fragment of Beethoven’s 7^th drifted down from a speaker on the top shelf. I think it might have been called the funeral march. I turned a chair around from a corner in the nearby Romance section and faced it towards the door.

I slouched. I think that I have always slouched. I crossed a shin over a knee and, with a book – balanced - I made a desk. I didn’t have anything to say. Nothing to compete with the bright May sunshine outdoors and the breeze there tickling the fresh green leaves filling out winter’s bare branches. The first hot day of this year, it was – or, at least that’s my recollection. The outside sounds, a whisper. I could have waited the rest of the day and into the evening for someone to walk by that door – someone I knew and could actually talk to - and me, not merely panhandling someone’s reluctant friendship.

This is where you came in, I suppose. From where I sit, the letters backwards on the glass, I imagined that you were smiling at me – and maybe for a moment, I got a little more than I actually deserved. Or perhaps you thought I was too busy to interrupt, my brow may have been furrowed, my pen scribbling on a scrap. Ah yes – we were but strangers in a used bookstore. Rhyme and reason – but not for the two of us. Still, the day through the door in front of me was bright.

I clicked my Pilot G2 and folded some words into a rectangle. I slipped paper and pen into my shirt pocket.

**

I’m making up this loneliness stuff – really – it comes and goes like the shadows of people walking by. I have a smile on my face more often than not and the downward squint of my left eye I simply got from my father. It’s mostly because of the bright light that I’m not hurrying towards just yet.

I’ll take some words away from these books – someone has carefully noted what they had to say in their time. But right now, carelessness would suit me better – maybe a kid tripping over a crack in the sidewalk and laughing. So many of these words are some kind of filler. Occasionally,  perhaps, a reminder to open your eyes to life outside yourself.

Still, it’s been quite pleasant chatting with your imaginary self. But someone else has surely been waiting for someone, too.  I think I’ll get out of this chair and go open somebody else’s door.