Almost to the End: The Shorter Poems: New and Old

If Bookshelves Groan

If bookshelves groan

It must be with pleasure...

Imagine being weighed down

By beauty and truth in print ...

Let us pray

Buckled by Joyce and Prévert

Testing the strength of your muscles ...

What delicious agony

Strain my tendons, Petrarch

With all your mental Laura lust.

After all

It is what one carries that counts.

Paris, November 14, 1987

These Haiku-like poems and longer verses represent nighttime thoughts and inspirations written down while reading Sam Hamill's translations in The Sound of Water: Haiku by Basho, Buson, Issa, and Other Poets. Some of them are actually based on the work of these poets, but most are simply inspired by them. Others come from the author's own musings.