Used Bookstore – a poem by Christian Mack

Used Bookstore

I am met by a labyrinthian assortment of shelves,
………….the smell of ink on yellowed paper, ideas placed

under the auspices of reality, but by no means
………….claimed by it. I feel that, as I trace my finger

across the spines, dust building under
………….my nail, that Plato must have been wrong.

Had he stood here, amongst Wordsworth,
………….Hardy, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Steinbeck,

he might have had a sense of the divine within
………….the temporal, a merger somewhere between these

stacks. Here the realm of ideas meets substance,
………….here there are no forms. In this collection, taciturn, reticent

and, yet, loquacious and expansive, lies paradox.
………….As they sit between shelves so, also, do books

straddle heaven and earth, a firm,
………….iron-wrought, paper bridge between spheres.

Christian Mack is currently an undergraduate English and History major at Trevecca Nazarene University and is on the editorial board of Nashville-based literary journal, The Cumberland River Review. His work is forthcoming in Front Porch Review.