Moving the Bookstore, Part One

We were there all day.
The elephants grew restless.
The sheer volume of volumes,
we said to each other,
seeking comfort. The sheer
endlessness of the words of man.
In one carton I packed a
cumulus of Updikes. They stacked
nicely like cups.
In another Mailer rubbed
fretfully up against
Malamud. In the end
box upon box, an
omnium-gatherum, a towering mon-
ument to all we’d forgathered.
In our dreams the elephants
pulled us over the mountain.
In our dreams we made a new
bookstore wherein flowed a brook
of honey; wherein flowered
our restless heartmeat, our restless
hunger for more fiction,
more biography, more of the
high sweet refinement, our poetry.

copyright 2007 Corey Mesler
bio
Barnwood magazine
Contents 07