Where Buddha Is
I thumb down the stack of books:
Paper Dance—55 Latin Poets
Poetry Like Bread (full as loaves
my mother made) subtitled
Poets of the Political Imagination
and here’s Billy Collins Sailing Alone Around the
Room—which is pretty much what we all
do to a great extent
until, at the bottom:
Precise V-5
which is not a book at all
but the label on the black pen
that lies here in incandescent light
at the bottom of a ziggurat of books
its axis aligned with their stepped spines
upon the golden oak table so perfectly here
for a moment Buddha is
“See,” he says, “I’m as real as
as joy and lament”
by Jim Culleny