John Delaney

The Book Sale

The books caucus under such rubrics
as history, biography,
and science fiction. But there are factions,
sometimes, like military history
and autobiography,
even science: an archipelago
washed by tidal waves
of readers and treasure hunters.
Of faith, hope, and love, the greatest genre
is Fiction and self-help, termed Soul Work.

People exit with their arms full,
toting a box, piles balanced with two hands,
volumes cradled close to their hearts.
Funds raised will cheer on charity.
But the payoff will commence in beds,
at kitchen tables, in commuting trains
and buses, at the beach, on planes
and pool-side lounge chairs in the heat,
in hammocks and screened-in breezeways,
at desks down the corridors of power—

in idle moments and utter silence.
Till the books begin their perennial
migrations to a library or church,
a town hall or school auditorium,
to pass on their vital secrets
and stories and wild inventions
to successive generations,
hungry for this tribal ritual
of holding a book and reading
everything that has or will or might have happened.

.

After retiring as curator of historic maps at Princeton University Library, John Delaney moved out to Port Townsend, WA, and has traveled widely, preferring remote, natural settings. Since that transition, he’s published Waypoints (2017), a collection of place poems, Twenty Questions (2019), a chapbook, Delicate Arch (2022), poems and photographs of national parks and monuments, Galápagos (2023), a collaborative chapbook of my son Andrew’s photographs and my poems, Nile (2024), a chapbook of poems and photographs about Egypt, and Filing Order: Sonnets (2025).

.

Back