Happiness In The Small Things

This morning as I loaded my commute and lunch reading into my bag, I didn’t really think about it. Instead I left it up to chance and have, like the previous two days, selected one of the thinnest books I had off of my shelf. While I have wanted to explore everything on my shelf anyway, the reason is partially for practical reasons and that is I’m carrying around a lot of baggage lately from work papers to yoga clothes and towel, waterbottle…etc. Today was about keeping the poetry light.

By chance, I grabbed Michael Longley’s The Weather in Japan, one of the slim volumes that pack a nice punch that I bought as a student in Belfast. The poems in it are not all masterful yet I love several of them. However, what really delighted me was the memory of buying the book and reading it the first time. As I opened it up I noticed a very thin paper sticking out just a hair on the top and flipped to the pages between pages 65 and 66 where I found a poem I loved and then I smiled-- I had bookmarked it using the receipt when I bought it as I’ve done so many times before.

When I saw the font and read the top it pointed to my favorite place in Belfast-- No Alibis-- one of the greatest independent bookstores in Belfast, located right near the Queen’s University campus where most of us lived on 83 Botanic Avenue. Like most things in Ireland it was a smaller place but had ample couches and sofas and chairs in the aisles with shelves packed with everything you could imagine. While not as organized as a library, it was one of those special bookstores where every single employee knew where every book they had ever owned was located and even where it was misplaced by the person who last read it and discarded it. They could scan your face and then their shelves and find something you were looking for but may not have known it. Honestly, if No Alibis were located near my office in D.C. today, I would go there every day for tea and a soft seat.

The irony in finding this receipt and the trip down memory lane is that when I got home this evening, I had an email awaiting me from a friend telling me about how the internet had killed one of his favorite things—used book stores—and how he has taken a day off in a couple of weeks to go to a used book fair. Some days it’s fun to experience the way little coincidences can put a smile on your face.

Today’s offering comes from that thin volume called The Weather in Japan, by Michael Longley, a great Irish poet—from Belfast— who won the T.S. Eliot Prize for this volume in 2000. Like nearly all poems in this collection, these are short but pack big punches of images and I offer two for today.

The Weather in Japan

Makes bead curtains of the rain,
Of the mist a paper screen.

The Waterfall

If you were to read my poems, all of them, I mean,
My life’s work, at the one sitting, in the one place,
Let it be here by this half-hearted waterfall
That allows each pebbly basin its separate say,
Damp stones and syllables, then, as it grows dark
And you go home past overgrown vineyards and
Chestnut trees, suppliers once of crossbeams, moon-
Shaped nuts, flour, and crackly stuffing for mattresses,
Leave them here, on the page, in your mind’s eye, lit
Like the fireflies at the waterfall, a wall of stars.