Divorce Hock

I go into the Book Rack

in Hickory, NC, to offer

a poster and leave a couple

of new books on consignment.

The owner says he’ll gladly

hang the poster but doesn’t

do consignment and no one

buys poetry these days, anyway,

but adds he has a lot

of poetry books and if

I want to make a trade

he might be able to oblige me.

I wander back to a dark

corner, expecting Edgar

Guest, Susan Polis Schultz,

Jewel, Leonard Nimoy

and other disappointments,

find instead Yannis

Ritsos, Donald Hall,

Nazim Hikmet, all

my favorites. It takes a while

to realize the odds of such

obscure, eclectic poets

finding refuge on the same

dusty shelves in Hickory,

NC, are too small

to explain such strange coincidence.

Then I open Tom

Sleigh’s Waking and find

inscribed inside, “For Scott,

a young and promising poet.

From his friend in the art, Tom.”

And there beside it my own

first book of poems

and inside in my own handwriting

the notes I’d written for readings

fifteen years ago,

long before my last

marriage ended in divorce,

long before I got

my life and sanity back,

even longer

before I paid the man

for books I’d already owned.

by Scott Owens

Email: asowens1@yahoo.com