The Peddler of Books, By BARRY SEILER

I like it like this:

these books, this wagon, this road stretched

straight as a simple sentence, these similar

towns,

the one named Bitterness, the other Resignation.

I like this back and forth upon the earth.

I like it at night

gazing through a tear in my wagon’s roof

at the heavens and the heavens wheeling above

like a wagon whose roof needs patching.

I don’t care if no one reads a book,

I like to see them weeding in their gardens

as I roll by, their backs bent in respect,

their furious hands getting nowhere,

the erased pages of linen flapping above them.

And I like it at the tavern telling jokes.

I ask the keeper for an uncooked egg.

I say some eggs are sacred,

some when you hold to the light you see another

light

burning in the bedroom of the egg.

You see the bride arranged on her canopied bed.

You see the bridegroom closing the door,

disrobing, averting his eyes.

And when no one gets it, I like that too.

I like it in the season’s first snow,

whipping my poor horse along,

moonlight staining the snow gold

as the words on the spines on my books.

When it heaps and drifts, I like his easy refusal,

the way he shakes his head,

the way steam pours from his nostrils.

I dismount and pull.

Flakes sting my face, burn, chill,

like the ashes of anonymous texts rising

through the flues of the Winter Palace.

And I see on the road before me

my soul on its knees eating snow.

From “The Southern California Anthology, Volume IX,” Melissa Hartman, editor (Master of Professional Writing Program, USC: $7.95; 128 pp.). “The Peddler of Books” is the winner of this year’s Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, awarded by USC’s Professional Writing Program. The anthology, an annual publication of the program, draws contributors from around the country, including, this year, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, William Stafford and Vance Bourjaily.

1991 by Barry Seiler. Reprinted by permission.