and the best one should be
well-thumbed.
The used bookstore at the foot
of Turk Street might have one
with ghosts and dust sitting on
a shelf between the military
histories and Jaqueline Suzanne.
That's what the owner told me.
It’s the number one best seller of all time.
Number two is the English dictionary and
number three is The Valley of the Dolls.
Or so he said with a smirk and a wink.
Well, expectations don't always
pan out the way you think they will.
The pickings on the shelf were
a Children's Guide to Bible Stories,
a King James thick and fat as a brick,
and a small, nicely weathered one
that would have been perfect.
Except it was in German.
So, I went down to the big store
on Market Street with the glossy windows
and the theft detectors just inside the door.
There was a guy standing in front
of a row of ATMs next door, shouting at them,
flinging his hands around and cursing.
I silently agreed with him. A boy and girl
were walking behind me and the boy says
to the girl “he kept looking at me,
like waiting for me to steal something?
Yeah, because I satisfy all my petty
shoplifting needs at Walgreens. asshole.”
At the fancy bookstore, I have to ask the clerk
where the Bibles are. She says, “In the the basement
in the religion section.” I’ve never been down there,
I found the religion section. It had lots of books
about the Bible, like: Satan was a Gentleman
or Mysteries of the Gnostics or Walk with Moses,
The Truth about Opus Dei.........
all of these were across the aisle from
the transcendental flavors.
The seeking, helping, find-the-inner-truth
and calming ones. I just wanted to find
the regular Plain James Bibles, not the annotated,
reinterpreted, steroid-enhanced muscular
versions. A compact King James would do.
And I found a nice paper back edition,
About the size of the latest techno-military fantasy.
Would you like a bag? the cashier asked.
Yes please I said. i’ll read it later.
I used to have my own personal Bible,
my grandfather gave each of us grandchildren
leather-bound editions on our twelfth birthdays.
Red leather for the boys, white for the girls,
with our names embossed on the cover in gold.
He liked to read the psalms to us,
especially Psalm 23. In between playing
his albums of World War I soldiers’ songs.
He never was actually sent over there,
He spent the war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma
with the last horse drawn artillery unit in
the US Army, French 75 millimeter cannons.
My mother’s father, Grandpa Smith, the doughboy,
tenant farmer, and Baptist Sunday school teacher,
who was in the trenches never talked about it.
Now I had my own cheap copy and of course
the first thing I read was the Song of Solomon,
because I still knew where the good parts were,
the breasts like young roes, the ivory necks, and
eyes like doves and hair like flocks of goats and
temples like pieces of pomegranate. Pomegranate?
She had asked me for a left hand under her head
and my right hand to embrace her. Said the Bible
should get me through airport security in Tel Aviv
with a minimum of questions if I’m lucky.
-October 2006
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