I built the Little Free Library,
From odds and ends in the garage.
Six plywood scraps for the walls
The floor and the roof, sloped
Like a shed, waterproofed with
Some leftover bituthane
And shingled—not the right word, perhaps–
With bamboo cuttings from the
Unruly stand at the back of the house.
I filched a piece of plexiglass
From my wife’s art supplies
And inserted it into the door–
I hope she doesn’t miss it!
There were screws and hinges
In the garage but no latch,
Which meant a trip to hardware store.
But always a pleasure, gazing at the
Nuts and bolts, the tools,
The plumbing and electrical doodads.
The spray cans imprisoned in
Their locked cabinet.
I mounted the library on the wall
In front of the house.
Within easy reach of passersby.
But what would go into it?
I’ve never counted the books
In our house, but there must be thousands.
Bookcases in the living room, the bedrooms,
My office and my wife’s studio,
Little stacks beside the bed,
In the bathroom, at the end of the dining table.
The library would hold twenty books,
More or less. I would stock it,
Then patrons then would then keep
It going. Or so I hoped.
I didn’t want to just get rid of books,
But give my neighbors the opportunity,
To read books that I liked, that were
Written by authors with some facility
With the English language.
That shouldn’t be hard, I thought.
There was the paperback of In Our Time
I could let that go, I had read all
The stories at least once, some
Three, four, half a dozen times.
Expose a young reader, perhaps,
To a writer who may be out of vogue,
Whose life and masculine posturing
May be anathema to those who believe
That Huckleberry Finn was racist trash.
I had that book, too, but left it on the shelf.
What next? Ada, a book that defeated me,
Although I greatly admire its author.
But maybe a nexus of unforeseen things
Will lead me to pick it up some day,
And say, this is wonderful.
How about poetry? Several volumes of
Frank O’Hara, one will not be missed,
Although I felt a dim clutch in my mind
When I added it to the nascent stack.
Two copies of The Magic Barrel,
Which made for an easy decision,
But then long minutes pondering
A book of short stores by Katherine Anne Porter.
Suppose I had the urge to read Noon Wine,
Which entered my head the first time I read it,
In a claustrophobic college dorm room,
And burned there like an awestruck fire.
And so on. Some fiction, some poetry,
An historical account, a social treatise.
My wife is fond of mysteries, a genre I
Never managed to warm to, although
I admire the writing of some of the authors.
She added four books to the stack and
I brought it to the library and pushed
The books onto the shelf, feeling virtuous,
Even a little excited. I was improving
My neighbors’ minds!
Every day I checked to see what was gone,
What was added. The mysteries went
Quickly, the literature more slowly,
The poetry most slowly of all.
More mysteries appeared,
Along with thrillers and romance novels
I was tempted to remove the romances,
And dump them in the trash
Where they rightly belong,
But that would be unkind,
And maybe an act of bad faith.
I look every day or so and there is Clancy
And Koontz and Steel
And Patterson and Roberts
And King and two Grishams.
No surprise, but still I feel a twitch
Of disappointment. Then I see a note
Stuck between two books. Handwritten:
Thank you so much for hosting this library.
I come almost every day and I always find something
Good to read.
Unsigned, but it must someone from the neighborhood.
And there’s the homeless man who
Stops on his bicycle and browses
Like a bookstore patron, thumbing pages,
Nodding his head, sometimes making a remark,
Before riding off with a book or two.
No need for disappointment.
No need to believe that my tastes
Should rub off on my neighbors.
People are taking books because they want to read,
People are bringing books for others to read.
And that will surely make this off-kilter world
A slightly better place.
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