POETRY - Nancy Grayson's Bookstore

Nancy Grayson's Bookstore - Portland, Maine - Photo by Corey Templeton

Nancy’s used bookstore is closing.

It was the best bookshop in town—

prints and photos of old Portland

on the walls, classical music

always playing as she sipped tea,

by her collection of small busts

of great composers and authors

that seemed to chide the larger statue

of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

you could see through the store window

overlooking Longfellow Square.

The bookstore down in the Old Port

died a year or so ago. I bought

a novel by Wendell Berry there

and the owner talked to me

eagerly about Wendell’s work.

Now there are only four bookstores

left in Portland, three used, one new.

The store in Monument Square sells

magazines, cards, travel novels,

and commercial fiction. It feels

more like an airport concession

than a place to linger and talk

to the owner about new books.

The used bookstore on Munjoy Hill

is more for collectors of rare,

costly antiquarian books,

but The Green Hand with its life-size

stuffed seven foot Yeti that greets

us at the door is to announce

an Old Curiosity Shoppe

with a museum of “Weird Life”

at the back that can speak volumes

about the fossils of old books.  

Russ’s Yes used bookstore across

from Starbucks at High and Congress

is like a rent-controlled pre-war,

dark, downtown New York apartment

cluttered with the secret thoughts

of someone proud of depression

as a badge of adjustment to

to universal suffering.                                                     

With high piles of books on the floor

that block the shelves, you can’t see what

Russ has behind, so you end up

not able to buy anything.

Used bookstores are cemetaries—

books weathered tombstones of authors

once famous but now forgotten:

Thomas Costain, Eugene Field,

Charles Morgan, Philip Wylie.

And, of course, I find myself here

in an unread first edition—

hardbound from 1981.

But now it is not just authors

that are becoming fading ghosts,

but bookstores and books themselves.

e-books will ephemeralize

literature and history,

until some solar maximum

wipes out ipads and ATMs

and we are left in the clutter

of our own silent devices

to start from scratch on rocks again.

I think the Great Pyramid must

be a CD for which we’ve lost

the reader; or perhaps the gods

gave up and took it back with them

to the stars in Orion’s Belt.