Tomes

Tomes


There is a section in my library
for death and another
for Irish history,
a few shelves for the poetry
of China and Japan,
and in the center a row
of imperturbable reference books,
the ones you can turn to anytime,
when the night is going wrong
or when the day is full
of empty promise.

I have nothing against
the thin monograph, the odd query,
a note on the identity
of Chekhov's dentist,
but what I prefer on days like these
is to get up from the couch,
pull down The History of the World,
and hold in my hands a book
containing nearly everything
and weighing no more
than a sack of potatoes,
eleven pounds, I discovered one day
when I placed it on the black,
iron scale my mother used to keep
in her kitchen,
the device on which she would place
a certain amount of flour,
a certain amount of fish.

Open flat on my lap
under a halo of lamplight,
a book like this always has a way
of soothing the nerves,
quieting the riotous surf of information
that foams around my waist
even though it never mentions
the silent labors of the poor,
the daydreams of grocers and tailors,
or the faces of men and women alone
in single rooms-

even though it never mentions my mother,
now that I think of her again,
who only last year rolled off the edge
of the earth
in her electric bed,
in her smooth pink nightgown
the bones of her fingers interlocked,
her sunken eyes staring upward
beyond all knowledge,
beyond the tiny figures of history,
some in uniform, some not,
marching onto the pages
of this incredibly heavy book.

Billy Collins

Posted over on Poemhunter