A Volume of Mcclatchy

A Volume of McClatchy (on reading "The Ten Commandments" by J.D. McClatchy) - Cheryl L. Higgins @2001 I picked up your book. No, I ordered your book special hard-back from the local shop a neighborhood place where literary types and Yale professors stop on their lunch where the proprietor came round from behind to check his shelves by eye and called you 'our local boy'. Our local boy. I almost looked up when the bell jangled and the door banged shut. Six slow steps that stopped on the fifth. The paper-shred scent of ink and pulp draws the senses to the walls. Old brick dust sealed with thick paint sets the books, your books a censer among them, somewhere. Do you come to see them? Four copies down to one? Down to none? In the hands of a new reader, now. Or a writer. Now your truths become ours in these poems, your own veiled soul a sacrament for the masses a confession of wafer-thin sheets whispered on the tongue. Behind the stacks your penance becomes our own absolution, writers murmuring your absolution as they read you write themselves how desperate blood-sport can be made of lives at the liver's expense, nodding, yes I see this happens, this is how it should be told. But then, we catch on your candor and comes the dry choke, the flush of embarrassment swallowed, for aren't these the self-crucifixions for secret sins so like our own laid open with the power of blood and passions the writing which readers covet and we feel the jealous prick, we writers as readers for not confessing first, and then contrition, and then that recurrent seduction of maybe becoming so bold our selves one day the titillation of fashioning our own sins with such truth oh, no! Then, yes, and then, Yes! For when we write in half-truths does not some better truth lie just beneath? And here, you've given us yours. The man on the stairs steps behind me to wait in deference to my purchases your book tucked away, already mine, now. He leans in to get a look at the title thin polite smile; fellow lover of words, to care what I might read so I tip it back that he might more easily see his face open in slight surprise and what might be approval, but has he read it? I can't tell. He steps to the counter. "McClatchy," he says. "Have you any copies left?"