At Powell's Books, Portland, Oregon

Walking down the stairs at Powell's Books, I look at the backs of the shoes of those walking down the stairs ahead of me and see them being placed in a great big pile of shoes, such as the pile of shoes I saw at Auschwitz when visiting there in 2014.

Why is there always somebody standing where I wish to be standing? Even when I seek out the most obscure places--the poetry section for instance--there's somebody standing in front of the bookshelf I'd hoped to investigate. The somebody this evening is a woman standing in the aisle reserved for poetry, reading a book of poems. I don't dare go in front of her because she might stop reading, which I don't want her to do, or she'll hit me, which I don't want her to do either.

Reading through a book of dark aphormisms by a female writer, I find that if I read her book as having been written by the new mother that she is I read her book differently: the book is still aphoristic, but filled with light. 

I walk around the bookstore in a daze. It's as if I'm both in a metal cage and an empty field that's been planted with oaks and Christmas trees. I watch a little girl read a book in the Children's section where there are plenty of chairs. She has a green bow in her hair; I'm guessing she's ten years old. Halfway through the book she's reading she yawns, puts the book down. When the little girl puts the book down I have this thought: that there's a last time each of us will do something, whatever that something is. 

When I wander into the area of Powell's where literary criticism is shelved, I can see why it's easier to criticize something hyperbolically than it is to praise something in plain language.