Ode to an Encyclopedia
O hefty hardcover on the built-in shelf in my parents’ living room,
O authority on linen paper, molted from your dustjacket,
Questing Beast of blue and gold, you were my companion
on beige afternoons that came slanting through the curtains
behind the rough upholstered chair. You knew how to trim a sail
and how the hornet builds a hive. You had a topographical map
of the mountain ranges on the far side of the moon
and could name the man who shot down the man
who murdered Jesse James. At forty, I tell myself
that boyhood was all enchantment: hanging around the railway,
getting plastered on cartoons; I see my best friend’s father
marinating in a lawn chair, smiling at his son and me
from above a gin and tonic, or perched astride his roof
with carpentry nails and hammer, going at some problem
that kept resisting all his mending. O my tome, my paper brother,
my narrative without an ending, you had a diagram
of a cow broken down into the major cuts of beef,
and an image of the Trevi Fountain. The boarding house,
the church on the corner: all that stuff is gone.
In winter in Toronto, people say, a man goes outside
and shovels snow mostly so that his neighbors know
just how much snow he is displacing. I’m writing this
in Baltimore. For such a long time, the boy wants to grow up
and be at large, but posture becomes bearing;
bearing becomes shape. The man makes a choice
between two countries, believing all the while
that he will never have to choose.
by James Arthur