I’m beginning to make room on my bookshelves for new things and so I’m picking up books I haven’t looked at it years to ask stay or go?

I can’t recall why I have Linda Pastan’s The Last Uncle. I recall being very interested in her work at one point but there’s nothing marked in this volume and so I’m uncertain. When I re-read now, it’s quiet, it’s speaking but there isn’t much music. I flip through pages, wondering was it for her poem “To Penelope”? I don’t like it’s conclusion.

I bounce off of Wendy Babiak’s Conspiracy of Leaves for what I think is the second time. I admit to myself I purchased Sandra Beasley’s Theories of Falling so I could look cool. I turn open the Galway Kinnell book which is not my poetry but which was a gift.

To my surprise, I find Monique van den Berg’s along the snow-road. What delightful memories of Mo on the internet so many years ago, such a different internet. And here in “Curves” she writes, “the moon would never call herself fat” and “we prefer curve // integrity in fullness” and I smile. Good for her, to say that then, to still say it to me now.