In the shop window one reads Rare
and Second Hand Books underneath
the awning’s tilted blue – right opposite
stands the frosty franchise coffeeshop
where days mistreat desire
and smoking is not allowed. I climb
up to the small cubby-holes
dunked in the sweet staleness
of literature and run my eyes from A
to Z along the slender, chipped
spines of poetry. This is the
emptiest space of November
and that which most comforts me;
the book I choose for fifty
pence has on the first page
a name and an address: Shirley Ann
Eales, of Scottsville – a faint
autograph with long, triangular
capitals in which imagination
finds for a moment enough
pretext and oxygen to burn.
This book had another life,
belonged in another house, on another
bedside table – and the thought,
because so obvious, summons
a sudden dizziness, an abrupt tunnel
into the world’s immenseness
where chance is touted. Ah, we know
life is improbable when we find
ourselves musing, one insipid
mid-afternoon, on an unknown woman
who read poems in Scottsville in the
70’s. But might there be in this some sort
of meaning, some sign kept for
someone wiser or more innocent
than me? I don’t know who
or where you are, Shirley Ann,
but how beautiful it would be if
one day, thanks to this same chance,
you came across your name in these verses.