Gail Hennessy’s ‘In a Second-hand Bookshop’

from Written On Water

I am with Virginia Woolf’s
‘variegated feathers’ searching
among wild, homeless books…

old friends cheek by jowl
nestle from floor to ceiling

I am searching for
Abelard’s Letters to Heloise.

A young man tutors a scarfed
woman at a paper strewn table

they are darkly exotic
from old Persia perhaps

I think of Scheherazade
flying carpets, Arabian Nights

her tutor translates as I
teeter on a stool behind them

and hear -

my flesh is too sweet to explain

I come down from the stool
and float from the shop 
cradling the pearl of his lesson

and so…

I have framed this line
by an unknown poet

so that you may know
words I do not want to forget

a line from a poem
I am unable to write.