A bookshop is a repository
of things ended, so they stand in rows
purporting a beginning in the title,
all said and done in content, to propose
each one the same conclusion: ‘what is’.
Books become stones in order to be read,
there is that hardness of conclusion, weight,
volume, space on the beach, and time, what’s different? –
and once read, replaced; there to meditate
perhaps less than a rock’s more timeless state.
Books are undermined by the same despair
they engender in the beholder who
cannot read them all; yet achieves the same
conclusion in each ’what is’; in that to
fall short, book publication to continue.
In identity is end, be it book
or stone, and identity defines ‘what is’;
and this the universe aspires to
in every form and in the whole it is;
roundly states ‘what is’; never says, ‘it is’.
Never, ‘it is’; yet, what is book or stone,
the universe, but demonstration? – God
named in abstraction holds identity,
whose timeless zone through ‘what is’ created
reveals ‘it is’ fulfilled in eternity.
