Reader Depressed

by Mark Halliday

Basement full of books garage full of books –
and we leave our litter . . .

Little glut-thicket of half-signals and flicker-links within my skull
not efficiently organized for implementation of any 75-year plan

Faulty equipment tends to cause a mess

Oh not to leave my son and daughter with the depresso-heavy chaos
of nearly three thousand books

Those books will seem archaic artifacts in the electro-digitized world
of my old age –

nearly three thousand archaic artifacts: depressing
simply for being of a disappearing life; also
most of them depressing because I never did read them
because I was so much smaller than my fantasies
and a person is terribly finite; but also
maybe eleven hundred of them depressing in another way
because I did read them or read in them and marked them
with my finicky marginal notes tending to make those books unbearable
for any conceivable next reader;
we use and we use and we leave our litter.

When I turned fifty I think I passed a point not realizing it
I passed beyond the phase of my life in which I could believe
each book I read would contribute to the great
assemblage of understanding, the great coherence
to be built in my spirit –

spirit which turns out to be too entangled in
the little glut-thicket of disorganized flicker-links . . .

My father when he was eighty-six said quietly
that he didn’t expect ever to read The Brothers Karamazov
and his eyes looked far past the walls of his room.

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Read What Is Wrong with the Book Fair by Mark Halliday.

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