An Unfinished Ode to the Cellar and to, oh, so many, Cellarites

The University Cellar,

maybe the only bookstore in the world

founded because students got themselves

arrested, born and gone in less than 20 years.

When we worked and played there

we thought taking books as we wished

was an entitlement of ours. We were writers,

artists and, oh, so hip.

Not everyone took whatever

it was they wanted—

there are always a few good apples,

more honest folk than you can count

in every bunch. But I wasn’t one of those.

More than forty years later

there are books on my shelves

that walked out of that store with me.

Tonight, on the couch,

I am reading one of those,

a New Directions paperback,

Gary Snyder’s Earth Household.

Had I paid for the book,

it would have cost me $1.95

less the truly legitimate discount.

A half hour’s work would have paid the bill,

But at the time, I measured wealth

in books or a bottle of wine with friends

or offers to share a bed or a couch

or in how often the Doors of Perception

opened wide for me. Not money,

which had nothing to do with wealth.

And so all the books belonged to me,

And I to them. I knew title, author, publisher.

I knew hard cover or soft, trade paper or quality,

when they arrived, where they were shelved

and all the ones I learned from and got lost in.

I ran my fingers down their spines,

drank them with my eyes

and slipped them in my pockets.

Just so, the wet meadows of Snyder’s

Earth Household and the girl

“skirt blown against her hips, thighs, knees,

hair over her ears,

climbing the steep hill…”

real or imagined,

working nearby,

shelving books,

but always ready to play hard.

We worked there,

our lives ran together

mixing like blood and water,

sharing a bed with Lucy in the sky

or a pipe with El Tigre

the night before he left for points west,

reckoning he might visit

Snyder’s Lookout View,

unchanged from a 1935 photo

to the time seventeen years later

when he looked himself to find

“Same snow patches: same shapes.

Year after year; snow piling up and melting.”

And what Tiger saw,

when he went were

the same shapes and piled up snow waiting

to melt. But Tiger’s gone now

and our Earth Household in jeopardy.

The snow doesn’t fall

and we didn’t see that coming.