A friend sent me this poem, which seems appropriate to the website of a book publisher.
The Haunted Bookshop
for Howard Gerwing
Isn’t haunted.
Not by definition at any rate.
However, if Ciardi is to be believed,
every word contains a ghost,
is a root into the past, and writing
is an act of raising the dead, a way
of communicating, and all our bodies
are like graves perhaps, resting
places haunted by life, and these ghosts
are merely movements of language
we feel on the backs of our necks,
and the shop a place of origins,
a graveyard where flesh melts
and leaves the inside of a book.
And pages are journeys that we read
like palms and lines disappearing
into the past, lines that vibrate
against the mind, that strum across our skin:
melodies, rhythms falling back through time,
reaching for us from a deep place, the dark wells.
And I am a Custodian
feeling the spectres creep.
All is silent and yet I imagine,
as I pace from section to section,
that every book is haunted, that
every book we open is a departure,
a chance to sail and dive into
another’s life, to be haunted
and possessed by this spell of language.
That is our legacy, to haunt
and to possess, and these books
are what remain of the soul, the
blueprints of Man and Woman, and
when we read we are breathing life
back into life, connecting the past
with the present, releasing the spirit.
Carrying the seed from mind to mind
is our way of reproducing the word.
As to the question ‘Are you really haunted?’
Well, that all depends on you.
How much you are prepared to believe, and
how far you are prepared to travel.