Bookseller

I don't really care about the characters in books, certainly not about the people who write them. I'm not much interested in their contents, how one book supports or argües with another. I like the objects, the shape and color of them, and the pleasure they take in themselves.

They create abstract patterns: a large red book separated from a small blue one by a used yellow; or a whole shelf assuming twenty shades of green, the variations blending into each other until individual volumes almost disappear. The books make an ever-evolving kaleidoscope, colors shifting into new patterns almost every day.

I prefer to think that it's willed, chosen by the books themselves.

But there is a deeper joy in the bookshop, one that comes despite or because of my need to keep the books in some kind of order. A book on tantric meditation will suddenly appear in the psychology section. I reshelve it. A month later it pops up in the European history section. Six months after it's in the last shelf of the poetry books, looking comfortable between Yeats and Zukofsky. The books find their own order Their movement seems a dance with a geologie tempo, so slow I can't see it. The dance is like the story country children teil about trees moving at night, just a millimeter or two, nothing that can be noticed in the morning, until one day a child climbs onto a rope swing that's tied to a maple branch, and he swings out as he has done hundreds of times before, but this time slams straight into the side of the barn.

Reprinted with permission from "Life Science and Other Stories, " by Keith Taylor (Hanging Loose Press).