Used books

The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!

My reference shelf with my chapbook, books I’ve edited, and the journal I edit

I love books. I love libraries. I’ve always dreamed of having my own personal library, with four walls of books, shelves so high you need a ladder to read the top shelves. We spent hours in our local public library when I was a child. I’d sit myself down surrounded with tens of books and check out as many as I could. I loved losing myself in the shelves. I love the smell of books, the joy of buying a brand-new book, or checking one out from the library, bringing it home to read, and curling up on the sofa with a blanket for the evening. But there is nothing quite like finding a used book that you’ve always wanted, one that wears the history of all of its owners.

I discovered Poe’s Complete Works at a used bookstore in a small East Texas town and my brother bought me the Tennyson and Matthew Arnold volumes in London.

This week’s poem celebrates the used book.

Used Book

The book calls to other books guided by its voice, I bought one with rain on its cover.
 
A tanka by Hiroshima Yoshikawa

---

Droplets of rain stain the cover
like the rings revealed when 
a tree is cut down

This tree
        these pages
                this book

where I find 
on the fifth page 
a coffee stain

What will this book tell me of you, 
its past reader?

A student at a café
Or in the library
sneaking coffee in to stave off sleep

A woman reading one last page 
           before rushing off to work
A man missing his bus stop 
           to finish a chapter

Will I find notes in its margins
underlined sentences 
starred passages
dog-eared pages to return to?

What will this book tell me of myself?

---

I wanted to write something connected to libraries, and I rediscovered this poem in one of those folders of discarded poems, and just like the used book, I decided this one deserved to be read by someone other than me and my poetry group.

I would like to recommend a couple of the SmallStack posts on libraries. I especially loved this one from

Rachel Shenk

Summer Reading and

Jenny Parrott

’s Checking Out. You can read many more at the Seed pod library thread.