Daily Diary, Day 678:
PARNASUS
I buy and sell old things, no more than trash,
then with the modest gain of honest cash,
I'll find among the stacks an aged book
and buy a keeper for its leathern look.
Within each whiskey box and pile upon
the floor, they snicker, challenge me, and yawn.
Bret Harte and Ezra Pound correctly say
that I am poet fraud, with feet of clay.
We are at impasse, so for self-respect,
I love them, but control them with neglect.
I keep these books out of conceit, for when
they speak ideas, then I am kin. But then,
my job's to buy old books, not be their lover.
I grub for gold, just for its date, or cover.
This helter-skelter graveyard pile of stones
marks just the minds of heroes, not the bones.
Belle-lettres, sure, and others best unread,
now with me just because those minds are dead.
These bookish stones are haunted by dull spots,
by boredom and small dreams of twisted plots.
Here is a tome so weakly writ it passed
a wasted life, unread until the last.
This one, you see, was opened many times,
cried at, and laughed with, for its stirring rhymes.
Right still can prosper midst the morbid rocks.
Hard diamonds lurk in every musty box.
—Joseph Locke