
The warm wind is turning the pages
of the book from poem to poem,
Whitman, then Frost, Snyder, Dickinson, Bly, Crane.
Then, when things get calm, I end
my reading where all the ladders start
hoping to find a way to climb
from the dank darkness of the foul
rag and bone shop of the heart
on rungs of words on yellowed pages,
or whispered from some light high above.
I was sitting outside reading poems and looking for inspiration from The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology. The wind did turn the pages when I set the book down and I glanced at where it had selected poems. Interestingly, the anthology does not include the Yeats poem that gives the collection its title. That poem is “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” which begins with a line much like my reading session – “I sought a theme and sought for it in vain” and ends about the same place that I ended:
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.