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?"
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