In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Bookshelf
  • Diane Mehta (bio)

I

The shelves were crowded With Germany’s wars, the suicide Confessionals of those who live Inside their mind’s locomotive.

And if you pick a life up, Note the fragile pages penciled With dates, cities where you stayed And what the papers really meant.

Young, military romantics’ War-deadening simplicities In half-sized books of poetry Are quieted by new technologies.

Not by what was documented, A dull poet’s lover or whiff of war, The region’s agriculture, An unremarkable event.

Decades passed with no economy Of rage, propaganda in the fray, Civilians screwing time away With the endless nation-state.

II

Cookbook-plaid is to the right, Mrs. Peachtree’s bake-me pies Perfected to the practiced lies Of shake-and-bake theology. [End Page 655]

The Joy of Cooking reconciles Time’s interminable coastline Where meals are exclamations, Periodic insights to domestic tides.

Except for nearby ethnic treats— Madhur Jaffrey’s dumbed down Feasts omit the rough red-pepper fire That measures authenticity.

Volumes too thick to get through. Recipes retaliate with dust And dull food, instructions In half-spiced Anglicized English.

The most precious is the least embellished. A notebook filled with marked-up Type, double-spaced dinners On yellow paper, hand-corrected errors.

III

Silk myths on lower shelves— Bombay soirees and cigarettes, With Europe in the wings like some Stand-in actress: nostalgia in a plinth.

Kipling’s magic kingdoms In the hills, crafted for convalescence While the Lords battled autochthonous Barbarians for the joy of good living.

Clenching survival but fit for dinner, Fresh lobsters in your kitchen Sizzled to vermilion death At the hands of hired cooks. Neighbors grew old one ass-slapping Afternoon in their first-floor flat While a beggar sucked an orange She stole from the trash. [End Page 656]

One shelf up, Narayan’s Malgudi. His villages are comedies unless you live there, Pacing predictable as digestion or bicycles— Windows of craziness better to look into.

Epics, wars, and avatars in two volumes You might have read—oddly, proudly Resting against Jews and Russians on the shelf That’s eye-level, closest to your heart and head.

Malamud, Dreiser, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Mann Among paperback Victorians precariously Double-stacked along the edge, waiting To be resurrected in the upstairs chair.

IV

Your leisure is a time sheet for America: The mastodonic house on Main Between the creek and school and reds Of autumn, the fiction of a well-read mind. Years accumulate by books You read, and in their fantasies Stories occur, or they fall apart with the plot. A well-loved book is lost to dust. Lately, the shelf where Gray’s Anatomy rests Strains below diagrams of hearts, Your heart trembling as if in its place You had removed a life-altering book.

Diane Mehta

Diane Mehta has published poems in Salamander, The Formalist, The Columbia Review, and The Antioch Review. “

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