Look what we have here:
some books bought with a student’s savings,
as if land purchased for a house
that you might never build. Plato, Hegel, The Marxist Movement,
heavy cloth covers. Sideways, behind Aristotle, rests Art Nouveau,
like the head of an elderly woman on the train nodding off
which your shoulder tolerates out of politeness.
Books in foreign languages, bought with the last change
from shops you’ll never visit again:
Tarkovsky’s Techniques, exchanged for five food vouchers;
Bergman, Hitchcock, Louis Buñuel reveal only part of the wall,
each the end of a misleading path inside a pyramid.
African Masks, Aztec Culture, Egyptian Gods
all bought on a rainy day perhaps, as an excuse to stay indoors.
And again the visual arts albums
labelled Ars in Latin like medicinal bottles
that camouflage a bitter taste.
Hugo, Turgenev, Stendhal…
relics of first love, second love, of…
A dark empty space
and further, Dostoyevsky’s White Nights
with its green irony on the cover that says,
“Throw a coat over your shoulders first…”
And lower, Gaudí and other architectural books…
A smooth transition between what you wanted
and what you were able to attain.
Encyclopedias, temples without roofs.
Shakespeare exchanged for a noisy Soviet radio.
Poetry books: thin, sly, bought at discounted prices,
breaking apart like crumbled bread thrown at swans in the park.
The only ones arranged horizontally
are The Erotic Art of the Middle Ages, The Ethical Slut, and Tropic of Cancer—
easy to find when feeling around in the dark,
like slippers under the bed.
In a corner, the holy books, the Gospels.
They’ve arrived here by themselves—you didn’t spend a cent to buy them.
Each volume almost never opened. How can you believe something
that doesn’t ask for anything in exchange?
And on the very bottom, The Barbarian Invasion, history, science…
Time to read with glasses. Linear reading. Andropause.
To show someone your library is an intimate gesture,
like giving him a map, a tourist map of the self
marked with the museums, parks, bridges, galleries, hotels, churches, subway…
and the graveyards that appear regularly
at the edges of every town, at the beginning of every epoch.
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[spacer height=”20px”] Click for the Translator's Note (and to learn more about Ani Gjika)
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Image: ” B o o k s ” by Kate Mereand-Sinha , licensed under CC BY 2.0
