There’s a book by Margaret Atwood
I didn’t buy today,
but I thought about it.
I think I used to have it.
I know I read it once.
My parents gave it to me.
They’d signed their names inside.
The one I didn’t buy today
may have been a new edition
of something that is old;
a book already read.
I looked it up on Amazon,
and read a bit in preview.
I saw it in a bookstore,
the pages, sandwich-thick.
But I didn’t buy that book today.
I compared prices, formats,
and other books as if fresh produce
at the Superstore. As if reviewing socks
and shirts, fingered for the quality,
fingered for the feel,
and fingered with a mind on
my bank account’s constraints.
Such romantic things, these books,
like family photos of Mom and Dad,
and gauzy times remembered,
more golden than they were,
like books by Margaret Atwood
you’re sure that you have read.
Re-read, books aren’t quite the same,
even though each one’s familiar.
“I remember that,” you say,
but you don’t remember what you think.
You remember what’s remembered
but what you read, isn’t what’s recalled.
It’s not the same. It’s better,
or maybe not as good.
It’s a different book you read,
that reads much like the other.
Like pictures of yourself,
old here, young there;
different, but the same,
like books read a second time.
Such romantic things,
books and bindings and particular
paper, marked with coffee stains.
Linotype printed. Typeface designed
by dead Italians,
or someone in the Netherlands
with a name you’ve never heard.
Romantic, these books, smelling of nostalgia,
and old glue. And basement must.
Like old family photos, periods and people
recalled, but not exactly. Time gilded
by imperfect recollection.
I didn’t buy that book today,
the one by Margaret Atwood.
I’m pretty sure I read it,
when it was signed inside.
January 2021
Note: The book is Lady Oracle, a Christmas gift in 1976 from my parents. They (my mother) signed the inside, “From Mom and Dad, Christmas 1976…” Or something like that.