Used Book

by Julie Kane

What luck—an open bookstore up ahead

as rain lashed awnings over Royal Street,

and then to find the books were secondhand,

with one whole wall assigned to poetry;

and then, as if that wasn't luck enough,

to find, between Jarrell and Weldon Kees,

the blue-on-cream, familiar backbone of

my chapbook, out of print since '83—

its cover very slightly coffee-stained,

but aging (all in all) no worse than flesh

though all those cycles of the seasons since

its publication by a London press.

Then, out of luck, I read the name inside:

The man I thought would love me till I died.