Wander Among the Bookshelves in the Poem 'The Bookshop' by Dick Allen

We love a bright, airy bookshop with natural light streaming in big windows. Maybe there’s a cozy café tucked into a corner or up a winding staircase to a second story lined with books and smelling of fresh coffee.

But we have also been known to fall in love with a moodier bookshop — one that’s seen books pass in and out of its shelves for decades. Perhaps there are some secrets tucked among the weathered spines and bits of paper with the smell of old books wafting in the air.

This poem by American poet Dick Allen evokes the latter. It invites a leisurely stroll among the shelves of a shop with history and a seasoned bookseller.

The Bookshop — Dick Allen

• You enter in the evening, after walking down
• Three steps to a miniature courtyard and a door tied open
• With a piece of brown twine. The table lamps
• Have tassled shades the color of scorched parchment,
• Tiny pools of yellowed light beneath them,
• So that looking across the room seems like looking
• Across a small autumn garden. The proprietor,
• Wire-rimmed glasses glinting, nods but doesn’t lift his head
• From his reading and the rye bread sandwich
• Into which he’s nibbled an almost total moon.
• You browse, and while you do, your hands
• Grow heavy and old, as if by taking close-packed books
• From their shelves you are pulling bricks from a wall
• Bound to collapse should you remove too many
• And not replace them. What you’re searching for, among
• These histories, these poems, these illuminated guides
• To the soul, or the soul’s companions… these compendiums
• Of fossils, stars, speeches, journeys when the world
• Was a path through forest or waves against painted eyes
• On the bow of a wooden ship plying the Aegean,
• Is a single line of calm. This evening, you come close,
• Closer than ever before, for it starts raining
• Outside among the streetlights, and a tabby cat
• Does figure eights around your ankles, the proprietor
• Sighs deeply behind you. When you turn, he’s brushing
• Specks of pale white brie and crumbs of bread
• Carefully from the pages of his open manuscript
• Into crumpled wax paper. Without a word
• He takes the book you hand him, toting its price and tax
• On the smudged back of an envelope, his stubby pencil
• Writing small numbers. You pay him what he asks
• And walk out into the rain, a black umbrella
• Held high above you, the bookshop receding
• Until it becomes a dab of flickering light
• In the far reaches of Prague, or Budapest, or Rome,
• Or what the eye sees when it looks down into
• A heavily-varnished painting found behind the stacks
• Of books in a closet: dark city at night unknown;
• Artist unknown; the light almost there, almost gone;
• Rain and leaves and shadows on the cobblestones.

About Dick Allen

Dick Allen was born in 1937 and grew up near the Adirondack Mountains in New York. His work was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Frost. He was one of the founders of a movement started in the 1980s called Expansive poetry, which he described as ‘narrative, dramatic and sometimes lyric poetry of the late 20th Century that conveys significant non-Confessional observations, thoughts and feelings about the world outside the Self and about the Self’s various relationships with this outer world.’ In 1984, he was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for his book Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic. He also won the Robert Frost Prize, Hart Crane Poetry Prize, and Pushcart Prize, among others. Read more of his poems at New Criterion and Poetry Foundation.

Top image courtesy of Hatice Yardım/Unsplash.