Lachlan Brown #2 - For the end of semester

For the end of semester

You know that you need to clean
your office when a pile of books

collapses onto you. There is
something fitting, I guess,

about being struck by a tower
of one’s own ignorance,

the guilt of all that you’ve
left unread or unfinished:

to be slapped by The Slap,
to be zwacked by Fay Zwicky’s

Poems 1970-1992, to be entombed
under Geoffrey Hill or knocked

senseless by Ranciere’s Dissensus.
One day humanity will probably

attempt to build an immense new
Babel, made entirely of second-hand

copies of The Norton Anthology
of English Literature. Can you

imagine it? All those student-editions
with their uncracked spines, holding

the foundations together, while millions
of pages stretch up into an unthinking sky.