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Sorry - in my remarks on the Lauterbach poem, I meant to say "Mainstream meaninglessness." -- After that meaty masterpiece of hers, these two recent ones of mine (no doubt overmasculinist, unpleasantly "closed," depressingly retrograde) may serve as a ... sorbet. Note: Umberto Saba and Charles Peguy were poets who a century or so ago ran used bookstores. Best Shot Small, squarish, thick, with a pale-green cover, it made me feel learnèd, carrying it around: Hendrik Willem van Loon’s Story of Mankind, with his spare, quasi-Expressionist line-drawings. The story seemed to occur mostly in Holland, but I liked how he explained, or expressed, mysteries. If he were sitting, for example, in 1930, on a bench in Holland, and the Emperor Napoleon rode by and, with a glance, summoned him, he, van Loon – even knowing what he knew – would have to fall in. That impressed me at eleven. Later I entered some five or six thousand used bookstores, often unpromising, from Bangor to San Diego. Through the wrong end of a telescope I see sidewalks, me, entrances, then my back as I leave, carrying something. The people who run used bookstores often play the worst music they can – Forties novelty-items, polkas – and their talk is comparable. I never met a Saba or a Péguy. What I can’t see through the telescope is what all those purchases led to, beside what’s on my shelves: carcasses, mummies, the undead, statues, and vivid speaking faces, however shadowed now. If I could look back instead at cars I repaired or stole, sweaty dances, sweatier knife-fights and a few hundred more strange beds, I might be happier; but I couldn’t enclose them in a few pithy lines, as I have here. Delivery System In youth, night moved; you put on more miles, more hot miles, than odometers showed. Now, constrained, you lie politely when, from graves behind you or ahead, creditors come. Night itself remains healthy, muscular though motionless; no pill can knock it out. But you, should you rise, read, eat, steal from the body, which is penniless, and the bankrupt day. Past time to invest in wisdom, but every foray into that market yields only nonsense: *Instantaneous painless death, once the privilege of nobles facing headsmen, became widely available with the gun and was perhaps the latter’s deeper mission.*