Boxing It Up

In search of more storage,

I began to box up the books

I know I won’t get to for a few years.

I’ve kept out my Volokhonsky translation of

Brothers Karamazov.

I have no doubt it’s outstanding.

War and Peace (Constance Garnett translator)

Followed.

I put away Sailhamer, Chesterton, Lewis.

In went Wendell Berry,

Marilynne Robinson,

Annie Dillard.

And I had a moment

Just a moment

In which the memory of the person I wanted to be

At twenty—erudite, cosmopolitan, urbane—

Overwhelmed me.

Had I not taken that half decade detour into farming,

Spent all those hours learning, trying, failing—

Perhaps that would have been possible.

So I let the grief consume me,

Body wracked with sobs.

And then the moment passed

And I went down for lunch.