Sometimes That's How it Goes, Building Libraries

 

SOMETIMES THAT’S HOW IT GOES,

building libraries. Derek Sheffield’s

Not for Luck, for instance, brought

to Mt. Virginia for Nick, who wanted

to talk poems. Bringing it

from the Mothership,

I’d forgotten Derek begins

with this Lucille Clifton epigraph,

And the grains of dust would gather

themselves along the streets

and spell out, These too are your children.

This too is your child.

Opening the front door of Mt. Virginia,

I ask, This elegance, too, a child of God,

because Lucille Clifton’s new collected

rests on the dining room table.

I know this because I put it there.

Here I am with Derek again,

Especially What Needs Saying,

his title, It never stops this reserve

of doing what needs doing.

Nick lost his father two years ago,

writes about him now, but that’s not

why I brought Not for Luck for him.

Nor is It for the ink color switch

so beautiful in Luck on the cover.

I brought it for how Derek has found

a way to go beyond his teacher

without having to be better than,

or even to take his teacher out.

How Derek and Kevin became

better at love together. That,

that’s an important thing to know.

Thresholds bring the damnedest

surprises. And how to tell Nick

I’m not giving him this book

I brought for him after-all.

After this. It’s going to Megan

who runs Mt. Virginia

with a family of women

running a retreat house B&B.

She’s left trail markers for guests

walking the forest, mapped

for people who come to see.

She showed her movie last night

on the environment. She’s

a tree planter. Derek’s poems

might be gnomes in the library.

Gnomes too. Gold fish

in the black pond

and all that attracts light.

Jim Bodeen

13 July 2021