| This Edition's Poetry |
Divorce Hock
I go into the Book Rack
in Hickory, NC, to offer
a poster and leave a couple
of new books on consignment.
The owner says he’ll gladly
hang the poster but doesn’t
do consignment and no one
buys poetry these days, anyway,
but adds he has a lot
of poetry books and if
I want to make a trade
he might be able to oblige me.
I wander back to a dark
corner, expecting Edgar
Guest, Susan Polis Schultz,
Jewel, Leonard Nimoy
and other disappointments,
find instead Yannis
Ritsos, Donald Hall,
Nazim Hikmet, all
my favorites. It takes a while
to realize the odds of such
obscure, eclectic poets
finding refuge on the same
dusty shelves in Hickory,
NC, are too small
to explain such strange coincidence.
Then I open Tom
Sleigh’s Waking and find
inscribed inside, “For Scott,
a young and promising poet.
From his friend in the art, Tom.”
And there beside it my own
first book of poems
and inside in my own handwriting
the notes I’d written for readings
fifteen years ago,
long before my last
marriage ended in divorce,
long before I got
my life and sanity back,
even longer
before I paid the man
for books I’d already owned.
by Scott Owens
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