Giving a Box of Books Away
–Roger Mitchell

Little caskets of my former dreams,
I feed you back into the Ganges
of living perceptions, extravagant
longings, that life, no matter how
scattered, buffeted, ridden by floods
of feeling and need, can’t do without.
Let somebody else finish Tasso.
Let somebody else put the citadel
of Plutarch, the shield of Proust
on the shelf above his bed to protect him
from a life without extravagant hope.
My underlinings in Freud, my shouts
in the margins of Dostoyevsky, my first
edition of Goodbye Wisconsin, my
Swap and Go: Home Exchanging
As a Way of Life, as the way of my life
becomes clear and less cluttered,
I set afloat in the sleepy bulrushes
of the delta like a child I couldn’t keep.
Good-bye ambition, good-bye to keeping
around what even memory lets go.
The sea greets us like a long-lost friend
while gigantic mountains of cumulonimbus
collapse and inflate across the sky.