Vincent Spina: At the Gulfport Library
I’m in the reading room
counting years and how
this piece fits into that other
it’s almost sexual
—you knew that already—but i am old
and allowed to gum my plankton
surmising it all was
a puzzle. I mean in the second half
of the other century Fats Domino pounding
his piano: “Ain’t that a shame”.
This is my first try at anything
since reading Solie’s “The Way In…” W. S. Merwin
whose name reminds me of “merlin” a small falcon
magical and Ralph Angel…”how old
and black my blood is…” poems: truth
can’t be otherwise
otherwise, the golden years
haven’t gone off as planned: the library being
no place for old men. Books peek out
from shelves like the lives of a disturbed conscience
running deep as the Gulf…and the gulf
around each one of us. In the meantime
the librarian helps an old man find
his missing name who is he I ask
as many names as books
as many names as books and names combined: the jest
infinity plus math play on us. For now
we the species forget we don’t remember peace as impenetrable
as the mats of sargassum in the borderless
Sargasso Sea see
how one thing fits into another
how the penis, after all, fits or that once
perhaps there was a life of earth and work
or whether the person who went to bed last night
in the one who wakes that century when the lines of dominoes
fall down in the order that they rose
The librarian gives up. The library will be closing
borders closing. Books that say anything they wish.
We forget that we have forgotten remember the shock
of the rising sun the keys
to the piano are gone
Copyright 2018 Vincent Spina
