Marvell’s Garden and Reading Deaccession

by Harrison Fisher

Marvell’s Garden 

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine and curious peach

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons as I pass,

Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.

                                                      -       Andrew Marvell

Ed, you told me about

reading to your friend on his deathbed, 

how he wanted to hear

Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden,”

and so here, in the epigraph above,

are the lines you quoted

I didn’t know then, which are,

to my ears now, sufficient music

for any leave-taking.  Your lesson

took hold and lives on, old friend.

And you are here no more,

I know.  And here no more,

I know it.

Reading Deaccession

I went to my neighborhood

branch of the city library to see

an exhibit of about thirty prints—

most shouldn’t have been hung

for public viewing.

As for the printmakers themselves,

I felt as if I were suffering for their art,

which is not fair to me.  Art is short—

life too, and our lifelong short art offers

little enough to begin with.

I ordered a book

through interlibrary loan

and went home.  I needn’t relate here

what book, but I will soon know

everything about its subject.

Isn’t that the promise of books? 

Crack one, and both book and reader

are opened for the transmission of all

the knowledge within.  But it’s a transmission

we fail.  Why do we fail?

Each book draws upon so many others,

but we sleep for long intervals with our eyes open

during a book.  Each book is like a library

unto itself in which we are often

caught chin down in a carrel, dozing.

Each book is like a Library of Congress,

British-burnt to ash in the War of 1812 but re-seeded

by Th. Jefferson, Bookseller, his matter and energy

compounding through the years

to near-infinite volume.

Each book is a Great Library of Alexandria,

partly burned as Caesar tried to immolate

the Ptolemaic fleet near the docks, later restored

in part, finally left to dwindle away

for lack of stewardship and funds—

such a modern demise—

the legendary collection lost to us,

lining the open-air walkway that

leads into waves of tufted sedge, papyrus

lining the banks of liquid millennia.